The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition 9781400883516

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THE MACHIAVELLIAN MOMENT

THE MACHIAVELLIAN MOMENT Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition With a new aftemord by the author Responsible Responsible Responsible Responsible With a new introduction by Richard Whatmore

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton and Oqord

Copyright © 1975 by Princeton University Press Foreword to the Princeton Classics Edition copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, NJ 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR All Rights Reserved First paperback edition, 1975 Second paperback edition, with a new afterword, 2003 Princeton Classics edition, with a new introduction by Richard Whatmore, 2016 Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-17223-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016945835 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Linotype Janson Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ press.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

CON TEN TS

Introduction to the Princeton Classics Edition Introduction

v ii xxiii

P A R T O N E.

Particularity and Time The Conceptual Background

i The Problem and Its Modes a)

Experience, Usage and Prudence

3

ii The Problem and Its Modes b)

Providence, Fortune and Virtue

3i

in The Problem and Its Modes c) The Vita Activa and the Vivere Civile

49

P A R T TW O.

The Republic and its Fortune Florentine Political Thought from 1494 to 1530

iv From Bruni to Savonarola Fortune, Venice and Apocalypse

83

v The Medicean Restoration a)

Guicciardini and the Lesser Ottimati, 1512 -15 16

114

vi The Medicean Restoration b)

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Machiavelli’s II Principe

1 56

Rome and Venice a)

Machiavelli’s Discorsi and Arte della Guerra

183

vin Rome and Venice b)

Guicciardini’s Dialogo and the Problem of Optimate Prudence V

219

CONTENTS

ix Giannotti and Contarini V en ice as Concept and as M y th

272

PART TH REE.

Value and History ✓ in the Prerevolutionary Atlantic x The Problem of English Machiavellism M odes o f C ivic Consciousness before the C ivil W a r

333

xi The Anglicization of the Republic a ) M ixed Constitution, Saint and Citizen x ii

The Anglicization of the Republic b ) Court, C oun try and Standing A rm y

x iii

361

401

Neo-Machiavellian Political Economy T h e Augustan Debate over Land, T ra d e and C redit

423

xiv The Eighteenth-Century Debate V irtu e, Passion and Com m erce

462

xv The Americanization of Virtue C orruption, Constitution and Frontier

506

Afterw ord

553

B ib li ograp hy

585

Index

601

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[I]

The Machiavellian Moment has awed and sometimes overwhelmed readers since its publication on May 21, 1975. Reviewers, even those who were critical, quickly identified the book as a masterpiece. For intellectual historians it confirmed that a new discipline had indeed been established. For scholars across the social sciences and the humanities, The Machiavellian Moment presented a model of historical practice. Over forty years its arguments and its method have been attacked and defended; the consequences of the book for historians and political theorists have been endlessly debated. It has attained the status of a classic and must be placed among the most significant works of history to have appeared in the later twentieth century, equivalent to E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) or Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). In many respects the book continues to define the practice of intellectual history and is the most recognizable example of intellectual-historical research, alongside Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978). Reading The Machiavellian Moment is a rite of passage. A sense of how distinctive The Machiavellian Moment was can be gleaned by comparing it with a landmark work of 1975, the long-awaited Hume’s Philosophical Politics by Duncan Forbes. Forbes’s work transformed Hume studies. Pocock’s book altered the way the history of political thought was written. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison) was published in English and in French in April of the same year. Both works articulated new perspectives upon the past. Each author faced an array of negative responses. The Machiavellian Moment has stood the test of time in that scholars continue to use its categories and its conclusions, especially concerning ideas about politics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This justifies a new edition of The Machiavellian Moment. The last appeared in 2002; its afterword by John Pocock supplied a history of the book’s reception and the response of its author to a variety of interlocutors, many of whom had misunderstood the book’s contents and its author’s intentions. The foreword to this edition adds to what we know by outlining a brief and partial history of the writing of The Machiavellian Moment. In so doing I have been aided by a number of intellectual historians, including John Pocock himself. Special thanks go to Quentin Skinner, who characteristically went beyond the call of duty in supplying me with copies of letters to him from John Pocock, written between 1968 and 1974. These are especially signifivii

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cant because most of John Pocock’s letters from this period appear to have been lost. The sole aim of the foreword is to persuade new readers to go further and read The Machiavellian Moment itself. [II] At some point during the Lent term of 1969, running from January to March of that year, John Greville Agard Pocock met Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner in the tearoom of the University Library at Cambridge. Pocock, then forty-five and on sabbatical from Washington University in St. Louis, had been in contact with Skinner since the early 1960s; Skinner, later professor of political science (1978) and Regius Professor of History (1996), was at the time lecturer in history at Cambridge and fellow of Christ’s College. Pocock knew Cambridge well. Born in London, he had moved at the age of three to New Zealand because his father, Lewis Greville Pocock, had been appointed professor of classics at Canterbury College. After graduating MA from Canterbury himself, John Pocock moved to Cambridge in 1948, where he completed a PhD under the supervision of Herbert Butterfield in 1952. After holding academic posts at Otago, at St John’s College, Cambridge, and at Canterbury, Pocock moved to Missouri in 1966 as the William Eliot Smith Professor of History. By this time he was well known among historians as the author of The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, a book that had appeared to great acclaim in 1957.1 The Ancient Constitution explained how the histories available to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English and French jurists framed and influenced the politics they considered to be legitimate and practically realizable.2 Pocock was also recognized for writing about how to undertake research into the history of political thought. Between 1960 and 1968, in a series of articles, he explained the method behind The Ancient Constitution and its application to other subjects that interested him, including ancient Chinese philosophy, civic humanism, Thomas Hobbes, and Edmund Burke.3 Pocock understood historic authors to have existed within As Caroline Robbins put it, “No more stimulating study of a seminal period in Atlantic history has appeared during the last decade.” Review of The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 82, no. 2 (1958): 223–25. 2 J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century. A Reissue with a Retrospect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957; 1987). 3 Pocock, “Burke and the Ancient Constitution—A Problem in the History of Ideas,” Historical Journal 3, no. 2 (1960): 125–43; “The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Enquiry,” in Philosophy, Politics and Society, 2nd ser., ed. Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1962), 183–202; “The Origins of the Study of the Past: A 1

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communities of individuals using languages, or discourses, comprising grammar, rhetoric, and a set of assumptions that governed the understanding of ideas and their employment in practical politics. Scholars were advised to identify the discourses operating at a particular point in time, forming an ideological context or paradigm, and available to authors to frame, shape, and express their arguments. The next step was to work out how these discourses set limits to the political possibilities open to a writer. An author’s utterances were then interrogated to see how far they were confirming or modifying the discourses or paradigms they were operating within. Authors would engage with discourses and paradigms sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, and their interlocutors who received and engaged with their arguments did exactly the same. The use of the term “paradigm” by Pocock underlined the influence on Pocock’s work of Thomas Kuhn, whose The Structure of Scientific Revolutions appeared as a book in 1962. Kuhn employed the term “paradigm shift” to describe the transition of knowledge within a scientific community from “normal science,” governed by an accepted set of beliefs, to another set of beliefs, incommensurable with the former normal science, but deemed to be more reflective of objective reality. Pocock was interested in the paradigms that operated in political communities, the accepted norms that imposed particular ways of thinking upon historical actors, and which could be seen to evolve and to be transformed in different circumstances, and sometimes to have collapsed and disappeared. At the beginning of 1969 Pocock was about to complete a major project, a collection of essays that appeared in 1971 as Politics, Language, and Time. This included six essays that had already been published in other places in the 1960s, and two new essays that framed the rest. The latter concerned the identity of political thought and the proper method to undertake research into it. These two essays, “Languages and Their Implications: The Transformation of the Study of Political Thought” and “On the Non-Revolutionary Character of Paradigms: A Self-Criticism and Afterpiece,” reaffirmed Pocock’s view that the study of the history of political thought was itself undergoing a paradigm shift.4 Comparative Approach,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 4, no. 2 (1962): 209–46; “Ritual, Language, Power: An Essay on the Apparent Meanings of Chinese Philosophy,” Political Science 16 (1964): 3–31; “Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideologies,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 11 (1965): 549–83; “Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes,” in The Diversity of History: Essays in Honour of Sir Herbert Butterfield, ed. J. H. Elliott and H. G. Koenigsberger (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965); “Time, Institutions and Action: An Essay on Traditions and Their Understanding,” in Politics and Experience: Essays Presented to Michael Oakeshott, ed. Preston King and B. C. Parekh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). 4 Pocock, “Languages and Their Implications: The Transformation of the Study of Political Thought” and “On the Non-Revolutionary Character of Paradigms: A Self-Criticism and

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Other historians of political thought were coming to similar conclusions in the early 1960s about the proper method of studying historical texts. Two who articulated the approach in print, following Pocock’s “The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Enquiry,” were John Dunn, whose “The Identity of the History of Ideas” appeared in 1968, and Quentin Skinner, whose “The Limits of Historical Explanations” and “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” were published in 1966 and 1969, respectively.5 John Dunn, like Skinner, was working at the University of Cambridge. Pocock, Skinner, and Dunn shared the goal of revealing what an author of a particular text was doing in writing a text, and explaining how a writer’s intentions were received and modified by other authors engaging with an original text. One of the central consequences of the approach was to broaden the study of political thought beyond the presumed canonical texts; the original title of Skinner’s “Meaning and Understanding” was “The Unimportance of the Great Texts in the History of Political Thought.”6 The aspiration was to abandon approaches founded on the assumption that identical questions were being asked by significant writers throughout history. Equally, the meaning of a text was not to be worked out either from the study of the text as a stand-alone document, or by sole reference to the social and economic context of its production. Although Dunn and Skinner published their essays toward the end of the 1960s, connections between them and Pocock had been established earlier. The sense of shared endeavor, Pocock has written, was evident on the appearance of Skinner’s iconoclastic first published articles on Thomas Hobbes and on the English Revolution in 1964, 1965, and 1966.7 The same can be said of Dunn’s equally transformative work on Locke, appearing from 1967.8 Such work, Pocock has noted about Skinner, “laid the foundations of an alliance between us, and with others, that nothing Afterpiece,” in Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 3–41, 273–91. 5 John Dunn, “The Identity of the History of Ideas,” Philosophy 43, no. 164 (1968): 85–104; Quentin Skinner, “The Limits of Historical Explanations,” Philosophy 41, no. 157 (1966): 199–215; “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): 3–53. 6 Petri Koikkalainen and Sami Syrjämäki, “Quentin Skinner. On Encountering the Past,” Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought 6 (2002): 34–63. 7 Skinner, “Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan,’” Historical Journal 7, no. (1964): 321–33; “History and Ideology in the English Revolution,” Historical Journal 8, no. 2 (1965): 151–78; “The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought,” Historical Journal 9, no. 3 (1966): 286–317; “Thomas Hobbes and His Disciples in France and England,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 8, no. 2 (1966): 153–67. 8 John Dunn, “Consent in the Political Theory of John Locke,” Historical Journal 10, no. 2 (1967): 153–82; “Justice and the Interpretation of Locke’s Political Theory,” Political Studies 16, no. 1 (1968): 68–87.

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seems likely to shake.”9 Skinner and Dunn too have acknowledged the kinship that they recognized on reading Pocock’s writings.10 New work was shared prior to publication. After Dunn sent two articles on Locke to Pocock, the latter responded by deciding “to send both of you that last bunch of scripts, because I wanted to show [Dunn] what I’d been doing in an effort to set up a model of political thought as an activity.” The “last bunch of scripts” was most of the contents of what became Politics, Language, and Time in 1971.11 By the time Pocock was due to visit Cambridge from North America at the end of 1968, Dunn was in West Africa, and moving into new research fields.12 To Skinner, on October 8, 1968, Pocock wrote, “It sounds very much as if you were working on the same thing [political thought as an activity] from a standpoint less sociological and more philosophical than mine.” He added, “I wonder if we should consider some kind of a joint manifesto.”13 Over the following years Pocock seriously contemplated writing a monograph on method to be entitled either “The Cave of Speech” or “How to Do Things to People with Words.”14 In a letter of December 1969 Pocock referred to the “Kuhn-Skinner-Pocock” approach. The question Pocock felt all three were addressing was “How to Do Things to People with Words and How to Respond to People’s Attempts to Do Things to You.” The difference was that Kuhn saw paradigms in scientific terms, as a mode of inquiry, and did not want to envisage them in political thought as a mode of rhetoric and persuasion. Pocock did, however, seek to involve Kuhn by writing to him, and sent to him a copy of Politics, Language, and Time inscribed, “in acknowledgement of a debt he probably does not want acknowledged.”15 Although Pocock did not receive a reply, they remained on good terms. Pocock, “Foundations and Moments,” in Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. Annabel Brett and James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 39; see also “Quentin Skinner: The History of Politics and the Politics of History,” in Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 123–42. The essay was originally published in Common Knowledge 10, no. 3 (2004): 532–50. 10 Quentin Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 233; John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the “Two Treatises of Government” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 101, 143. 11 Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1971). 12 Richard Bourke and Raymond Geuss, eds., Political Judgement: Essays for John Dunn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 13 John Pocock to Quentin Skinner, October 8, 1968, private papers of Quentin Skinner. 14 Pocock, “Verbalising a Political Act: Towards a Politics of Speech,” in Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method, 33–50. The essay was originally published in Political Theory 1, no. 1 (1973): 27–44. 15 Pocock to Skinner, July 12, 1971, private papers of Quentin Skinner. 9

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The links between Pocock and Skinner were especially close in the late 1960s not only because of their similar view of how to undertake research into the history of political ideas. It was also because they shared an interest in the Commonwealth tradition of writings identified by Caroline Robbins, and in the implications for Robbins’s genealogy of Hans Baron’s perspective on Florentine republicanism.16 Pocock had submitted to Skinner drafts of the chapters of the large work he had been working on since the early 1960s, and received in return fulsome comment. An indication of Skinner’s importance to Pocock’s ongoing research during these years is that Pocock dedicated Politics, Language, and Time to Quentin Skinner, the University of Canterbury, and the literary scholar John M. Wallace.17 By the time Skinner and Pocock were planning to meet in Cambridge, Pocock was reporting that his large manuscript was “in a curious state … I reached mid-point yesterday [October 7, 1968], in the sense that it’s in four parts: theoretical introduction, Florentine, French and English.” Pocock stated that he had “completed the theoretical part three years ago,” in 1965. He had “reached the end of the Italian section yesterday.” He also provided a summary of the argument as it stood in the final months of 1968: The introduction lays down the idea that constitutional thought is thought about particular political systems existing in secular time, and that the history of Renaissance thought is the history of the struggle against the limitations of the conceptual modes they had—experience-custom-prudence, providence-apocalyptic-chiliasm, fortuna-humanism-republicanism—for talking about the particular and secular. I then go on to apply this scheme to Florentine thought, and it seems to me to work out very well; but it has involved me in writing the only full-dress study of theory during 1494–1530 which I’ve seen—at any rate in English—placing Savonarola, Guicciardini, Machiavelli and Giannotti side by side in a developing context (and I even throw Contrarini in at the finish, in order to bring out the Venetian element a little more clearly). The result does excite me: it 16 Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstances of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1959); Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955; 1966). Skinner published “The Principles and Practice of Opposition: The Case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole,” in Historical Perspectives: Essays in Honour of J. H. Plumb, ed. Neil McKendrick (London: Europa, 1974), and had plans to write a book that went as far as 1800. See Mark Goldie, “The Context of The Foundations,” in Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. Annabel Brett, James Tully, and Holly Hamilton-Bleakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3–19. 17 John M. Wallace, professor of English at Chicago, was the author of Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).

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plays hell with a lot of traditional ideas about Machiavelli, who comes out much closer to an Aristotelian context than he’s supposed to … Strange and exciting things do keep happening, but the trouble is that I must have about 120,000 words in manuscript already, and if I go on to deal with French and English thought on a comparable scale I shall end up with a book three or four times the size of The Ancient Constitution.18 The full story needs to be told of how Pocock arrived at Cambridge at the end of 1968 with so much done and, by early 1969, so much still to do on what became The Machiavellian Moment. What follows are a series of points about some of the factors that led Pocock to write a book that vindicated the new method of approaching the study of the past. [III] Pocock’s intellectual journey began at Christ Church and at the University of Canterbury. It was at Canterbury that he first studied the principal forms of government and the history of political thought, the latter through George H. Sabine’s A History of Political Theory (1937), moving from the ancient city-states before Plato to Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism.19 When Pocock arrived at Cambridge in 1948, his work became greatly influenced by his supervisor, Herbert Butterfield. Butterfield, in The Englishman and His History (1944), had become interested in Robert Brady and the controversy over the origins of the House of Commons. This led Pocock to work on seventeenth-century constitutionalism. By the time Pocock was ensconced in Cambridge, however, Butterfield had moved on to research that became The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800 (1949) and George III, Lord North and the People (1949). Despite increasingly divergent interests, Butterfield fully supported Pocock and was instrumental in the first steps of Pocock’s career. Butterfield arranged a research fellowship at Durham University, where Pocock completed the writing of his dissertation, in addition to helping Pocock toward his first publication.20 Butterfield also supported Pocock’s return to Cambridge in 1956 as a research fellow at St John’s College. Encouraging Pocock to go his own way was undoubtedly key, and their relationship was “good but never close.”21 Peter Laslett influenced Pocock’s approach to political Pocock to Skinner, October 8, 1968, private papers of Quentin Skinner. On New Zealand and Sabine’s book, see Pocock, “Working on Ideas in Time,” in Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method, 20–32. 20 Pocock, “Robert Brady, 1627–1700: A Cambridge Historian of the Restoration,” Cambridge Historical Journal 10 (1951): 186–204. 21 John Pocock, private correspondence, November 11, 2015. 18 19

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thought more profoundly. Pocock has always acknowledged this, saying that he was “present at the creation” of Laslett’s innovative approach to the study of historical texts.22 After war work at Bletchley Park, where he decoded Japanese naval intelligence, Laslett returned to Cambridge as a research fellow at St John’s College and began studying the gentry in seventeenth-century Kent.23 He became interested in political ideas that were frequently circulated among gentry families in manuscript form. One of these texts, he discovered, was the Kent gentleman Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, or the natural power of Kings.24 Laslett was certain that Filmer wrote the work for friends who discussed politics in their manors, forming what Laslett termed “a dispersed university.”25 Laslett’s edition of Filmer’s Patriarcha and Other Political Works appeared in 1949, revealing the different context of the writing of the text and its posthumous publication.26 The point was that the Filmer who mattered to the history of political thought was the Filmer whose work appeared in the 1670s, when the writer of the manuscripts had been dead for almost two decades. Laslett was appointed lecturer in the Faculty of History in 1953; by this time he was already delving into the history of another case where delayed publication altered the reception of a text and therefore its received meaning: John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government.27 Laslett’s definitive edition of 1960 revealed for the first time that Locke’s work was an exclusion tract, written around 1681, rather than a revolution tract justifying the events of 1688/89. Pocock has written that it was Laslett who “revealed the mystery of contextualisation.”28 When Pocock met Laslett, he had already become aware of the complexities of contextualization, more so than Laslett himself. Pocock introduced himself to Laslett because he had discovered a manuscript at the Inner Temple of a letter of James Tyrrell’s to William Petyt, mentioning Patriarcha, and exhorting the latter to reply to Filmer’s Freeholder’s Grand Inquest. The appearance of Filmer’s works long after his death generated responses written in idioms as diverse as Locke’s Two Treatises, Algernon Sidney’s Discourses on Government, William Petyt’s Pocock, “Present at the Creation: With Laslett to the Lost Worlds,” International Journal of Public Affairs 2 (2006): 7–17. 23 Peter Laslett, “The Gentry of Kent in 1640,” Cambridge Historical Journal 9 (1948): 148–64. 24 Laslett, “Sir Robert Filmer: The Man versus the Whig Myth,” Cambridge Historical Journal 9 (1948): 523–46. 25 Laslett, “The Gentry of Kent in 1640,” 149, and later in The World We Have Lost (New York: Charles Scribner, 1973), 192. 26 Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Political Works, ed. Laslett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949). 27 Laslett, “The 1690 Edition of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government: Two States,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 1, no. 4 (1952): 341–47. 28 Pocock, private correspondence, November 18, 2015. 22

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The Ancient Rights of the Commons of England, and Henry Neville’s Plato Redivivus. Filmer’s meaning was understood by each author to have different implications for politics, yielding a more detailed and more nuanced portrait of the controversies of the time. When Pocock met Laslett again at Cambridge in 1956, Laslett had changed focus. He was now interested in the capacity of a linguistic philosophy inspired by logical positivism to address societal problems. This was reflected in the series of books he edited from 1957 entitled Philosophy, Politics and Society. Few of the contributors had a sense of history, and the dominant attitude was that no statement had a meaning beyond the criteria it appealed to. Although Pocock contributed to the series in 1962, he had already heard a version of the approach Laslett now favored at Canterbury in 1945, where Karl Popper gave the lectures that became The Open Society and Its Enemies, asserting the claim that every statement must contain means for its own falsification. Laslett later underwent a further intellectual evolution when he became fascinated by the extent to which patriarchal social structures in the family and in the state mirrored the sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century reality. The investigation of social structures through the techniques of historical demography, he decided, was more important than the study of the works of individual thinkers using contextual analysis. This led to the publication of his best-known work, The World We Have Lost: England before the Industrial Age (1965). Other figures at Cambridge impressed the young John Pocock. One was Michael Oakeshott, who had been appointed university lecturer in history at Cambridge in 1933. In the same year he published Experience and Its Modes, which described independent and “self-consistent worlds of discourse, each the invention of a human intelligence.” On returning to Cambridge after the war, Oakeshott completed his “Introduction to Leviathan,” took over the general editorship of the Cambridge Journal between 1947 and 1954, and there published the essays “Rationalism in Politics” (1947) and “Rational Conduct” (1950). In 1949 he moved to Nuffield College, Oxford, and in 1951 to a professorship at the London School of Economics. Oakeshott’s distinctive skepticism and historicism were very much in evidence in the later 1940s. Pocock wrote several essays for Oakeshott at this time and later contributed to the festschrift presented to him on his retirement in 1968. He has written that “Oakeshott has a good deal to do with my sense of history.” Another influence upon him was Duncan Forbes, whose The Liberal Anglican Idea of History was published in 1952, and who had begun to publish significant articles in the Cambridge Journal and the English Historical Review. The most important, for Pocock, were to be those concerned with Scottish thought and “scientific Whiggism.”29 Duncan Forbes, “Historismus in England,” Cambridge Journal 4 (1951): 387–400; “James Mill and India,” Cambridge Journal 5 (1951): 19–33; “The Rationalism of Sir Walter Scott,” Cambridge Journal 7 (1953):, 20–35; “Scientific Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar,” 29

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Pocock noted in the revised edition of The Ancient Constitution (1987) that in 1957, the date of the original edition, the Scottish Enlightenment “was known to me mainly through a series of articles by Duncan Forbes in the Cambridge Journal.”30 Pocock returned to New Zealand once more in 1958, having an offer of a permanent position at Canterbury. Here he was tasked with developing a new department of political science, although the subject had been taught at Canterbury for many years. His first appointments were Austin Mitchell, later well known in British politics; Jim Flynn, an Aristotelian from Chicago who became famous for his interpretation of IQ tests; and Richard Kennaway, who worked on foreign policy in New Zealand. Pocock also worked alongside the Canterbury historians, whose strongly Namierite eighteenth-century specialists included Neville Phillips, Marie Peters, John Owen, and John Cookson. It was at Canterbury, between 1958 and 1965, that The Machiavellian Moment was first planned, and it was there that some of the chapters were drafted: those concerning court and country ideology, concerning standing armies and the mixed constitution, the assertions about which Pocock called neo-Harringtonian (chapters 11 and 12 in the final version). When Pocock moved to Washington University in St. Louis in 1966, it might be said that in scholarly terms he moved from the world of Caroline Robbins to that of Hans Baron, from the controversy generated by the Commonwealthmen to the Florentines of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Pocock spent a summer at Columbia University at the medievalist Norman Cantor’s invitation in 1964, and Cantor asked him to write about European constitutionalist thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for a series Cantor was editing for John Wiley and Sons. Pocock, alongside historians such as Bernard Bailyn and Douglas Adair, was already being associated with “the republican synthesis,” because of his longstanding interest in Harrington and because of his 1965 article in the William and Mary Quarterly, “Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century.” The Aristotelian and Florentine background to the story of the foundation and survival of republics took shape at Washington University. [IV] When Pocock wrote the original preface to The Machiavellian Moment in November 1973, he noted that “the presence of Hans Baron looms numinously … over the whole scene.” This was “without [Baron’s] prior Cambridge Journal 7 (1954): 649–51. 30 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century. A Reissue with a Retrospect, 371.

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knowledge.” The work evidenced the influence of a number of well-known scholars, including Felix Gilbert, whose Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence had appeared in 1965; William Bousma, whose Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation was published in 1968; Donald Weinstein, the reader of the manuscript submitted by Pocock to Princeton University Press, and the author of Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (1970); Gordon Wood, whose The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 appeared in 1969; and Jack Hexter, then expected to be completing his own study of Machiavelli, which became The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation: More, Machiavelli, and Seyssel (1973). Also notable was the influence of Washington University colleagues, including Peter Riesenberg, whose Inalienability of Sovereignty in Medieval Political Thought had appeared in 1956; John Murrin, an expert on colonial and revolutionary history; and the political theorist Richard Flathman. Such colleagues would have aided Pocock in the early 1970s when he was rewriting early drafts concerning Florence. In November 1971 Pocock reported to Skinner that The Machiavellian Moment “is now up to 375 pages of holograph and typed extracts from the Florentines and will hit 500 before it is done.” This was the time when he was “trying to get that chapter on Giannotti and Contrarini into shape.” Pocock had also worked out what the final sections of The Machiavellian Moment were going to be. The sections on the Florentines would “lead into the final section, ‘Value and History in the Pre-Revolutionary Atlantic’—two chapters on the Anglicisation of the republic, and one on the Americanisation of virtue.”31 In the spring of 1972 Pocock considered himself to be within two chapters of completion. On the book’s plan as he then conceived it, that meant that there would be thirteen chapters in total. Pocock wrote to Skinner that one night he had awoken “shaken with hysterical laughter at the realization that there will be thirteen chapters in all, thus demonstrating the veracity of Straussian number-mysticism.” The tenth and eleventh chapters dealt with “English material at the moment of Harrington’s advent.” These were organized “under a modes of consciousness scheme.” The final chapters were then to cover “the neo-Harringtonian, American and (obliquely at least) French eighteenth-century stuff.” As long as he could “avoid the Scylla of rehashing and the Charybdis of breaking new ground,” he expected to be finished by May, leaving the summer of 1972 for his new edition of Harrington that Cambridge University Press planned to publish. Although Pocock admitted he was “a little troubled” at “flinging the reader into the huge prairies of Anglo-thought, after so many chapters of intense analysis of the Florentines,” he could not imagine a better way 31

Pocock to Skinner, November 5, 1971, private papers of Quentin Skinner.

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of covering all the ground.32 In early May 1972, however, he reported still having two chapters to go, and being faced with the difficulty of “how to recount the survival of civic humanist values in a world where they can’t be explained as grounded on the limitations of medieval epistemology.”33 It took until October 12, 1972, for Pocock to declare that “the Machiavelli book is now finished.” He now began to look for a publisher and at first approached W. W. Norton. The final parts of The Machiavellian Moment had changed. Between May and October 1972 Pocock added two chapters. He had made a series of discoveries when working over the sections of the book concerned with early eighteenth-century English thought, illustrating the widespread fears of the consequences of commercial society for the human personality. The eighteenth-century predicament was “to be saddled with [a political] language that defined value as static and history as necessarily involving movement away from it.” Pocock described to Skinner a process of scales falling from his eyes, noting in passing that the result did further damage to C. B. Macpherson’s theory of the rise of “possessive individualism” during the seventeenth century (The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: from Hobbes to Locke, 1962): All this [revision] was blown open by my discovery, in working through things like Defoe’s Review [of the Affairs of France, 1704–13] in search of origins for the Court thesis, of a presentation of Credit (public paper credit) as an inconstant female figure and irrational historical dynamic, unmistakeably none other than Fortuna (and to a lesser degree Fantasia) under a new name. So I had to rewrite my whole interpretation of the debate under William and Anne, using the title “Neo-Machiavellian political economy” and arguing for an eighteenth-century version of the “Machiavellian Moment” in which (1) the virtue-fortune-corruption pattern is repeated as virtuecommerce-corruption (2) early capitalism is apprehended, in a thoroughly un-Lockean and un-Macphersonian way, under the paradigm of credit-fantasy-passion-honour, so that an eighteenth-century version of false consciousness appears and we get the beginning of the sort of thought later to become Marxian. The additional chapters served as the ideal prelude to the final chapter on the Americanization of virtue, which served to “put Jeffersonian classicism and messianism together under the same Machiavellian-Harringtonian umbrella, and in effect to tackle the American problem of the retention of pre-modern values in a post-modern society.” Pocock then noted that completing The Machiavellian Moment had been “immense fun.” One downside was that he could no longer make a jest in the text at the 32 33

Pocock to Skinner, March 29, 1972, private papers of Quentin Skinner. Pocock to Skinner, May 10, 1972, private papers of Quentin Skinner.

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expense of the Straussians. He was, however, about to enjoy a sabbatical in Canberra, where he would be meeting another visitor, Crawford Brough Macpherson. Pocock was already relishing “flinging all this at him.”34 But despite being poles apart in terms of their view of political thought, the two got on well. In January 1973 W. W. Norton rejected The Machiavellian Moment, on the grounds that such a large book could be published only by a university press. Pocock approached Princeton University Press. By April a report had arrived on the manuscript.35 Pocock was immediately aware that the anonymous reviewer was Donald Weinstein. Weinstein’s criticism focused on the first two sections of the work, arguing that rhetoric played too small a role in the section on the Florentines, and that the account of medieval thought was unduly Augustinian; the latter ought to be further broadened to include figures such as Eusebius. Pocock managed to deal with such criticisms to the satisfaction of the Press. At the same time he was apprehensive. Once again he turned to Skinner. He was especially concerned about the relationship between the first part of the book and the subsequent contents. Pocock wrote that “the conventional reader will always be bothered by the fact that a book largely about Machiavelli starts at such a distance from him.”36 Pocock went so far as to ask Skinner whether he minded being thanked in the acknowledgments for his contribution to The Machiavellian Moment. While it was the case that “no one has read the whole damn thing,” the extent of Skinner’s long-standing advice on chapter after chapter put him at risk “of being partly held responsible” for the book. Pocock wondered whether Skinner might prefer not to be mentioned at all. As he had throughout their correspondence, Skinner boosted Pocock’s confidence concerning the book and underlined the fact that in his view there was no disjunction between the sections. On December 6, 1973, the final manuscript of The Machiavellian Moment went off in the mail to Princeton. Skinner had pressed Pocock to enlarge the scope of the argument, and Pocock confessed that he had again revised the final section, and provided Skinner with a summary of what he had and had not done: I looked back towards Locke from a rather Arendtian standpoint I found I’d got into, in order to remark that nobody seems to have much idea what became of [the] labour theory of value between Locke and Adam Smith. On the premise that we’re looking at the genesis of the later Marxian concern with “reification,” etc.; homo faber is clearly important, but I can’t find him in the earlier eighteenth century. Pocock to Skinner, October 12, 1972, private papers of Quentin Skinner. Pocock to Skinner, January 26, 1973, and April 27, 1973, private papers of Quentin Skinner. 36 Pocock to Skinner, July 26, 1973, private papers of Quentin Skinner. 34 35

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Incidentally, I have an Augustan seminar going on, and Mandeville is coming through as a very striking person: his “self-liking”—a form of false consciousness—seems to be well beyond Hobbes’ “glory,” and his “commerce” similarly ahead of Locke’s “property.” But I haven’t tried to get that into the book.37 Such sentences indicated that for Pocock himself, as for subsequent readers of The Machiavellian Moment, the book was a call for new work on a myriad of subjects newly illuminated by its contents. Pocock was invigorated. Finishing The Machiavellian Moment coincided with a time of personal change for Pocock and his family. After long periods of uncertainty about whether to leave Missouri, he finally determined to accept a long-standing offer from Johns Hopkins, where he became professor of history in 1974. [V] When he was writing The Machiavellian Moment, Pocock saw the work as vindicating a method for the study of political thought defined as a multiplicity of linguistic acts performed by language users in particular historical contexts. Pocock’s sense of context was always broader than that of other historians working on similar territory. This shaped the structure and content of the book and contributed to the grandeur so many readers felt on finishing it; they had been engaging with a singular historical imagination characterized by unparalleled depth and vision. Despite the acknowledged debts to a large number of historians, it was always the case that Pocock was doing something different. Part of this comes across in a partial outline of The Machiavellian Moment that survived in the papers of Donald Weinstein, an outline written by Pocock in 1968 describing what made Renaissance political ideas distinctive: I began some years ago to construct a study of Renaissance constitutional thought, and was led early on to ask myself the question what constitutional thought might be defined as being. I formulated the idea that it was political thought aimed at the understanding of particular political systems—Florence, Venice, France, England— rather than political society as an abstract universal. This led next to the reflection that late scholastic thought was very well equipped with concepts for dealing with universals, not too badly off for concepts relating the particular to the universal, but far from well supplied with concepts for understanding the relation, notably the succession or sequential relation, of one particular to another. By “particular” I mean, first, the particular phenomenon or event, next the particular decision 37

Pocock to Skinner, December 6, 1973, private papers of Quentin Skinner.

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aimed at regulating the phenomenon or event and ordering it within a social structure, and finally the particular national or municipal governing system viewed as built up from the tissue of particular decisions and the institutional structures to which they gave rise. I found evidence that fifteenth-century minds were by no means unaware of this perspective upon politics, but encountered great difficulty in reducing it to rationality, largely because “reason,” as they understood the term, was concerned with universal, abstract and timeless categories; which suggested the further reflection that the particular was seen very much as time-bound, as that which had a beginning and came to an end in time, and that time itself was viewed largely as the dimension of this very imperfectly understood particularity.38 Pocock went on to explain that following such an approach to past ideas led inexorably to viewing Renaissance constitutionalist thought as latemedieval historicism: It followed therefore that the kind of intellect I was defining tended to see the succession of particular events and actions in time as non-rational but that such means as it did possess of rendering the particular intelligible were also the means available to it of understanding the sequence of events in time and of rendering political actions viable and political structures stable in time. At this stage a study of late-medieval or Renaissance constitutionalism had turned into a study of late-medieval historicism; and, rather enjoying the prospect, I proceeded to construct a model of those means of understanding the particular and time which appeared to me to have been available. These are, basically, the languages or paradigmatic structures which I shall be employing. The final sentence is significant because it underlines what has made Pocock’s work unique. Many historians and political theorists were coming to the conclusion that understanding ideas in time entailed identifying the plural languages in which they were formulated. Pocock made the point that one of these languages constituted historical argument, establishing with other languages what Pocock has termed “a discourse of history or historiography.” For Pocock this established a gap between political thought or political theory and philosophy, the consequence being that history or historiography became a form of political thought and central to its enunciation through time. While Quentin Skinner and other leading historians of political thought were reconstructing the legal and Pocock, “A Method, a Model, and Machiavelli,” History Colloquium at Princeton, November 19, 1968, J.G.A. Pocock Papers, Johns Hopkins University. I am grateful to Beverly Parker for identifying and sending this paper to me. 38

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political philosophies that led to the modern conception of the state and the civil and political rights of its citizens, Pocock continued to study historiography and civil society. This led him to chart the political limits to premodern economics, and the gradual adaptation of political thought and history to commercial society, through the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth.39 Undertaking such a task led Pocock to demand a paradigm shift within British history.40 It also set him on the course of revealing the full extent of Edward Gibbon’s mental world, in the remarkable Barbarism and Religion series, published in six volumes between 1999 and 2015. Richard Whatmore

39 Pocock, “The Political Limits to Pre-modern Economics,” in The Economic Limits to Modern Politics, ed. John Dunn (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1990), 121–41. 40 Pocock, ed., Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

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is in two main parts, and the complexity of its theme must be the justification of its length. In the first half—subdivided into Parts One and T w o—I attempt a treatment of Florentine thought in the era of M achiavelli, which groups him with his contemporaries and peers—Savonarola, Guicciardini, Giannotti, and others—in a manner not previously attempted in English; and I do this by seeking to situate Florentine republicanism in a context analyzed in the three chapters composing Part One. I here presume that the revival of the republican ideal by civic humanists posed the problem of a society, in which the political nature of man as described b y Aristotle was to receive its ful­ fillment, seeking to exist in the framework of a Christian time-scheme which denied the possibility of any secular fulfillment. Further, I pre­ sume that the European intellect of this period was possessed of a limited number of w ays of rendering secular time intelligible, which I discuss in the first three chapters and group under the headings of custom, grace, and fortune. The problem of the republic’s existence in time had to be dealt with b y these means and no others; and it is the w ay in which the Florentines of the first quarter of the sixteenth cen­ tu ry—M achiavelli in particular—stated and explored the problem thus posed which gives their thought its remarkable character. “The M achiavellian moment” is a phrase to be interpreted in two ways. In the first place, it denotes the moment, and the manner, in which M achiavellian thought made its appearance; and here the reader is asked to remember that this is not a “history of political thought,” whatever that might be, in the last years of the Florentine republic, or a history of the political experience of Florentines in that era, designed to “explain” their articulation of the ideas studied. The “moment” in question is selectively and them atically defined. It is asserted that cer­ tain enduring patterns in the temporal consciousness of medieval and early modern Europeans led to the presentation of the republic, and the citizen’s participation in it, as constituting a problem in historical th is book

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INTRODUCTION

self-understanding, with which M achiavelli and his contemporaries can be seen both explicitly and im plicitly contending. It became cru­ cial in their times and remained so, largely as a result of what they did with it, for two or three centuries afterwards. Their struggle with this problem is presented as historically real, though as one selected aspect of the complex historical reality of their thought; and their “moment” is defined as that in which they confronted the problem grow n crucial. In the second place, “the Machiavellian moment” denotes the prob­ lem itself. It is a name for the moment in conceptualized time in which the republic was seen as confronting its own temporal finitude, as attempting to remain m orally and politically stable in a stream of irra­ tional events conceived as essentially destructive of all systems of secu­ lar stability. In the language which had been developed for the purpose, this was spoken of as the confrontation of “virtue” with “fortune” and “corruption”; and the study of Florentine thought is the study of how M achiavelli and his contemporaries pursued the intimations of these words, in the context of those w ays of thinking about time explored in the earlier chapters. In seeking to show that Machiavelli was one of a number of greater and lesser men engrossed in the common pursuit of this problem, I hope also to show that this is an appropriate context in which to study his thought, and that to study it in this w ay may diminish the amount of magniloquent and unspecific interpretation to which it has been subjected. It is further affirmed that “the Machiavellian moment” had a con­ tinuing history, in the sense that secular political self-consciousness continued to pose problems in historical self-awareness, which form part of the journey of W estern thought from the medieval Christian to the modern historical mode. To these continuing problems Machia­ velli and his contemporaries, Florentine theory and its image of Vene­ tian practice, left an important paradigmatic legacy: concepts of bal­ anced government, dynamic v ir tu , and the role of arms and property in shaping the civic personality. In the second half of the book—Part Three—I pursue the history of “the Machiavellian moment” into Eng­ lish and American thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and seek to show that the English-speaking political tradition has been a bearer of republican and Machiavellian, as well as constitutionalist, Lockean and Burkean, concepts and values. The crucial figure here, it is asserted, is James Harrington, who brought about a synthesis of civic humanist thought with English political and social awareness, and of M achiavelli’s theory of arms with a common-law understanding of the importance of freehold property. The first three chapters of Part Three are devoted to a consideration of how a classical republi­ xxiv

INTRODUCTION

can presentation of politics came to appear appropriate in the other­ wise unlikely setting of Civil W ar England, where the conflict of Tudor monarchism with Puritan religious nationalism and sectarianism ensured the presence of many more competing styles and languages of thought than seems to have been the case in Florence. The steady grow th of a neoclassical conception of politics, as in some sort an heir to Puritan millennialism, and its ascendancy in eighteenth-century Eng­ land and America, is a phenomenon that requires exploration, and this the remainder of the book seeks to provide. “The M achiavellian moment” in its eighteenth-century form pro­ vides the subject of the concluding chapters, whose emphasis is increas­ ingly American. The confrontation of “virtue” with “corruption” is seen to have been a vital problem in social and historical philosophy during that era, and its humanist and M achiavellian vocabulary is shown to have been the vehicle of a basically hostile perception of early modern capitalism, grounded in awareness of the elaborate con­ ventions of public credit rather than of the more direct interchanges of the market. The role of “fortune” was increasingly assumed by the concepts of “credit” and “commerce”; but while this led thinkers to perceive secular time more as dynamic and less as m erely disorderly, the antithesis of “virtue” with “corruption”—or “virtue” with “com­ merce”—continued to operate as the means of expressing the quarrel between value and personality on the one hand, history and society on the other, in its first modern and secular form. This quarrel culminates, so far as the eighteenth century is concerned, with the beginnings of a dialectical perception of history in Europe, and of a utopian percep­ tion of global space in America, where an essentially Renaissance awareness of time is seen to have endured into the nineteenth century. W hat started with Florentine humanists as far back as Leonardo Bruni is affirmed to have played an important role in the shaping of the mod­ ern sense of history, and of alienation from history. The book originated when Norman F. Cantor asked me to write a study of European constitutional thought in the sixteenth and seven­ teenth centuries for a series he was then editing. It has developed far from his or m y original intention during nearly ten years; but I must not neglect to acknowledge his initial encouragement, or the gener­ osity of his then publishers (John W ile y and Sons) in releasing me from- obligations which I had formed. W hen I seek to name those scholars whose work has meant most to me in w riting this study, the presence of Hans Baron looms numinously if controversially (and entirely without his prior knowledge) over the whole scene. Among those whose works and conversations I have more immediately consulted, the names of Felix Gilbert, Donald W ein­ xxv

INTRODUCTION

stein, W illiam J. Bouwsma, John M. W allace and Gordon S. W ood stand out in a host of others; and closer still to the historian’s w ork­ shop, J. H. Hexter (Y ale), Peter Riesenberg and John M. M urrin (W ashington U niversity), Richard E. Flathman (U niversity of W ash­ ington), and Quentin Skinner (Cam bridge) have read and criticized various sections of the manuscript at various stages. T hey of course bear no responsibility for its contents. Mr. Skinner even suggested the title, though he is not to be blamed for what I have made of it. I should also like to thank Peter Fuss, Max Okenfuss, and H enry Shapiro, m y colleagues in the St. Louis chapter of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought, who endured a great deal at m y hands; and mv dear wife, who organized the index at a time when we had many other things to do. And the Graduate School and History Department of W ashington U niversity have been an unfailing source of material, moral and intellectual support for eight years. J.G .A . POCOCK Washington University, St. Louis November 1973

XXVI

PART ONE

P A R T I C U L A R I T Y A N D T IM E The Conceptual Background

CHAPTER I

THE PROBLEM AN D ITS MODES a

)

Experience, Usage and Prudence

[i] throughout this book w ill be that of depict­ ing early modern republican theory in the context of an emerg­ ing historicism, the product of the ideas and conceptual vocabularies which were available to medieval and Renaissance minds— such as C. S. Lew is called “ Old W estern” 1— for the purpose of dealing with par­ ticular and contingent events and with time as the dimension of con­ tingent happenings. The republic or Aristotelian polis, as that concept reemerged in the civic humanist thought of the fifteenth century, was at once universal, in the sense that it existed to realize for its citizens all the values which men were capable of realizing in this life, and particular, in the sense that it was finite and located in space and time. It had had a beginning and would consequently have an end; and this rendered crucial both the problem of showing how it had come into being and might maintain its existence, and that of reconciling its end of realizing universal values with the instability and circumstantial dis­ order of its temporal life. Consequently, a vital component of repub­ lican theory— and, once this had come upon the scene, if no earlier, o f all political theory— consisted of ideas about time, about the occurrence of contingent events of which time was the dimension, and about the intelligibility of the sequences (it is as yet too soon to say processes) of particular happenings that made up what we should call history. It is this which makes it possible to call republican theory an early form of historicism, though we shall find that many of the connotations of our word “ history” were at that time borne b y other words and their equivalents in various languages— the words “ usage,” “ providence,” and “ fortune” among them. W ell-developed conceptual vocabularies existed in which the implications of these and other terms were expanded, and these vocabularies to some extent cohered with one a s u s ta in e d in t e n t io n

1 “ De Descriptione Temporum,” in Selected Literary Essays (Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1969). 3

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

another; so that it is possible, and seems not improper, to reconstruct a scheme of ideas within which the sixteenth-century mind sought to articulate the equivalent of a philosophy of history. This, with its many difficulties and frustrations, constituted the conceptual fram ework within wrhich the doctrine of the vivere civile— the ideal of active citi­ zenship in a republic— must struggle to maintain itself; and that strug­ gle is the subject of this book. The next three chapters therefore consist of an exposition of what appear to have been the chief of these vocabularies, the principal modes of rendering the particular phenomenon, the particular event in time, as far intelligible as possible. The assumption throughout will be that this was difficult: that the late medieval and Renaissance intellect found the particular less intelligible and less rational than the universal; that since the particular was finite, it was local both in space and time, so that time became a dimension of its being and consequently shared in the diminished rationality and intelligibility of the particular. T he lan­ guage employed suggests that this assumption is susceptible of a philo­ sophical explanation. The vocabularies which will be isolated, and around which this book will be organized, will be seen to have been of a sub-philosophical nature and to have offered means of rendering time and the particular intelligible on the assumption that they were less than perfectly rational; and hypotheses will be put forw ard con­ cerning late medieval philosophy, designed to show w h y this imperfect rationality may have troubled men’s minds. T he following generalizations may be advanced. Medieval philoso­ phy tended to debate whether the sole true objects of rational under­ standing were not universal categories or propositions which were independent of time and space. The process of arriving at knowledge of them had indeed to be carried out within time and space, but recog­ nition of their truth or reality was grounded upon perceptions inde­ pendent of either; there was a self-evidence which was timeless and non-circumstantial. Reality of this order consisted of universals, and the activity of reason consisted of the intellect’s ascent to recognition of the timeless rationality of universals. The truth of a self-evident proposition was self-contained and did not depend upon contingent recognition of some other proposition, still less upon evidence transi­ tory in time and space; it was in this self-contained quality that time­ lessness largely consisted. In contrast, the knowledge of particulars was circumstantial, accidental, and temporal. It was based upon the senseperceptions of the know er’s transitory body, and very often upon mes­ sages transmitted to his senses b y other knowers concerning what their sense-perceptions had permitted them to sense, to know, or to believe. Both for this reason and because propositions concerning particular 4

EXPERIENCE, USAGE AND PRUDENCE

phenomena had to be constructed b y moving through a dimension of contingency, in which one proposition was perpetually dependent upon another, knowledge of particulars was time-bound, just as the phenomena of which it was knowledge, localized by particularity in space and time, were time-bound themselves. If we use “ history” as a name for this time-dimension, we can say that a scholastic “ philosophy of history” emphasized its contingent and sub-rational character; but there are several senses in which we can say that the scholastic intellect did not offer a philosophy of history at all. B y “ history” we normally mean successions of events taking place in time, social and public rather than private and subjective in character, which we try to organize, first into narratives and second into proc­ esses; but this was not an objective which the scholastic intellect greatly valued. Narrative, the mere telling of a tale, it followed Aristotle in considering inferior to poetry, as poetry was inferior to philosophy, because it was inferior in bringing to light the universal significances of events; and these were best arrived at b y thinking which abandoned the particular event altogether and rose above it to contemplation of universal categories. As for processes and time as the dimension; of process, the process of change which the Aristotelian intellect singled out was that by which a thing came to be and then not to be: physis, the process b y which it fulfilled its end, perfected its form, realized its potential, and then ceased— all of which are extensions of the idea of coming to be and then not to be. A ll things come to an end in time, but the intelligibility of time was closer to being in the things, since the essential systole and diastole were in the being and not-being of the things, and it was this of which time was the measure. But the being and not-being of a thing is not identical with the replacement of that thing b y another thing; it is a closed process whereas the latter is open-ended; and to the extent to which the Aristotelian intellect iden­ tified change with physis, it tended to adopt a circular concept of proc­ ess and therefore of time. This had the advantage of rendering time entirely intelligible. If time was to be measured by motion, Aristotle considered, regular circular motion is above all else the measure, because the number of this is the best known. N o w neither alteration nor increase nor coming into being can be regular, but locomotion can be. This also is w h y time is thought to be the motion of the sphere, viz. because the other movements are measured b y this, and time by this movement. This also explains the common saying that human affairs form a circle, and that there is a circle in all other things that have a natural 5

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

movement and coming into being and passing away. This is because all other things are discriminated by time, and end and begin as though conforming to a cycle; for even time itself is thought to be a circle. And this opinion again is held because time is the measure of this kind of locomotion and is itself measured b y such. So that to say that the things that come into being form a circle is to say that there is a circle of time; and this is to say that it is measured by the circular movement; for apart from the measure nothing else to be measured is observed; the whole is just a plurality of measures.2 It is easy to detect that Aristotle was well aware that to treat time as circular because the sphere was the most perfect figure, and conse­ quently the best measure, was an intellectual convenience and not— what it became for others— an expression of faith in the ultimate intel­ ligibility of the universe; little less easy to see that he understood the difficulty of applying the circular concept to history, that is, to “ human affairs.” For in human affairs a great diversity of things happen w ith­ out any predictable order, and we can only say that these form a cycle as a means of saying that the whole variety of human experience forms a single gigantic entity having its own self-fulfilling and self-repetitive physis. Post-Aristotelian philosophies existed which were prepared to make this assertion, but we are now warned against overestimating their importance;3 it was well enough understood that the application of physis to human affairs was an intellectual convenience and a meta­ phor, and it was, after all, Greeks who pioneered the writing of history as what it has so largely remained, an exercise in political ironies— an intelligible story of how men’s actions produce results other than those they intended. But it was one thing to recognize that there were limits to the appli­ cation of circular physis to human history— to treating the succession of one thing to another on the analogy of the succession of the being and not-being of a single thing; quite another, at the philosophical level, to produce any equally satisfactory mode of treating the former succession. The Hellenic intellect wrote history, but it did not make history philosophically intelligible. As for the Christian intellect on these matters, it of course repudiated all ideas of cosmic recurrence; 2 Aristotle, Physics, iv, 223^2243; trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye in W . D. Ross (ed.), The Works of Aristotle, vm (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1930). 3 Robert F. Nisbet, Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969); Chester G. Starr, The Awakening of the Greek Historical Spirit (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968); History and Theory, Beiheft 6, “ History and the Concept of Tim e” (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1966).

6

EXPERIENCE, USAGE AND PRUDENCE

“ the wicked dance in circles” ;4 such a vision of things would make the world uncreated and endless. But Christian insistence on a God who had created the world and men at a point in time past and would redeem men and end the world at a point in time future, though of incalculable importance for the development of historical thought, did not of itself render intelligible the succession of particular events and phenomena in time, or ascribe any special importance to time consid­ ered as the dimension of that succession. The problem of divine fore­ knowledge, the problem of how the individual might relate his timebound existence to the immediate presence of a timeless and eternal God, led Augustine and Boethius to postulate the idea of a nunc-stans or standpoint in eternity from which God saw every moment in time as simultaneously created and present; but whether the individual affirmed the nunc-stans as an act of intellect or o f faith, it was evident that he could not share it and that one moment in time could not be known to an intelligence imprisoned in another moment. N o r was such knowledge of any final importance. Movement in fallen man, if effected b y his own depraved will and intelligence, was movement aw ay from God and toward further damnation, aw ay from meaning and toward deepening meaninglessness (this movement may be detected in the Infern o). Given the promise of an ultimate redemp­ tion, historical time could indeed be seen as equally the movement back toward G od; but this was effected by a separate sequence of acts of redemptive grace, sharply distinguished from and only mysteriously related to the happenings of history in the secular sense. T he footsteps of God might be in history, but history as a whole did not consist of such footsteps; eternity might be in love with the products of time, but time was a passive and inert beloved. Finally, an Aristotelianized Christianity tended to restore the analogy of physis; man had lost his form, his true nature, and reformatio— the w ork of grace— was operat­ ing to restore him to it. One might debate whether redemptio was not something more than reform atio: whether the movement consisted of a circular return to the state of the unfallen Adam, or a spiral ascent to a condition higher than that lost b y the felix peccatum;5 but in nei­ ther case did it consist of the succession of human actions and suffer4 Psalms x i: 9; quoted as from St. Augustine in Frank E. Manuel, Shapes, of Philosophical History (Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 3. 5 See generally, Gerhart B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform : Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the A ge of the Fathers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni­ versity Press, 1959), and for a particular instance of debate, Jesper Rosenmeier, “N ew England’s Perfection: the Image of Adam and the Image of Christ in the Antinomian Crisis, 1634 to *638,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., vol. 27, no. 3 (July 1970). 7

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

ings. Secular time— there is an etymological tautology here— was the theater of redemption, but not its dimension. W ithout redemption, furthermore, it was entropic: the loss of form, the movement from order toward disorder, which might be reversed but could not be meaningfully continued. Christian thought concerning a succession of particulars therefore tended to consist of a succession of efforts to relate the particulars to universals, carried out b y means that might be philosophical or poetical, typological, anagogical, or analogical— there was an impressive, even majestic, array of devices existing to this end— but operated so as to view each particular in its relation to eternity and to pass b y the suc­ cession of particulars itself as revealing nothing of importance. The eternal order to which particulars were related was not a temporal or a historical order, even when it made history by manifesting itself in time; and history wras often— though not always— seen as little more than a series of symbolizations, in w^hich sequential narrative was of little more than expository significance.6 The dual meaning of words such as “ temporal” and “ secular” is at this point beginning to appear in its true importance: both connote the ideas of time ( tem p u s, saecu lu m ) and of the nonsacred because noneternal. It is a useful simplifica­ tion to say that the Christian w orld-view — while of course containing the seeds of what was to supersede it— was based upon the exclusion from consideration of temporal and secular history, and that the emer­ gence of historical modes of explanation had much to do with the supersession of that w orld-view b y one more temporal and secular. This book is concerned with some aspects of that process, and it is going to be argued that an important role in generating it was played b y consideration of politics. There is a historically resonant vocabulary in which politics is presented as “ the art of the possible” and therefore contingent, “ the endless adventure” 7 of governing men, the “ ship” sail­ ing “ a bottomless and boundless sea” ;8 and if we think of the domain of contingency as history, “ the play of the contingent, the unexpected and the unforeseen,” 9 it will appear that a powerful stimulus to the grow th of secular historiography m ay arise from this view of politics (so that political man may prove to have had his own quarrel with the 6 For one aspect of this, see William J. Brandt, The Shape of Medieval His­ tory: Studies in Modes of Perception (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966). 7 F. S. Oliver, The Endless Adventure: Personalities and Practical Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931). 8 Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962), p. 127. 9 H .A .L. Fisher, preface to A History of Europe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ■ 9 3 5 )-

8

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Christian w orld-view ). But it is not from political philosophy, in the premodern sense of that term, that we shall see ideas of secular con­ tingency arising. In what some still like to call “ the great tradition” of that philosophy, the political community was seen as a universal phe­ nomenon, something natural to man. Efforts were made to state its idea or form, to relate its principles to those of the universal order of which it formed part, and these tended for obvious reasons to remove it from the domain of particularity and contingency. Y et even within the philosophical tradition it was recognized that political society was, when viewed in the concrete, a secular and consequently a time-bound phenomenon. The province of philosophy was not perhaps extended to include the provision of w holly temporal modes of intelligibility, w ays of understanding the time-bound from within secular time; but some­ what outside the philosophical tradition, modes of thought can be detected which were explicitly concerned with problems of political particularity, with what was intellectually possible when the particular political society was viewed as existing in time, when the particular contingency or event was viewed as arising in time, and when the particular society was viewed as a structure for absorbing and respond­ ing to the challenges posed by such events and as consisting, institu­ tionally and historically, of the traces of such responses made in past time. An attempt w ill now be made to expound three such modes of thought and, in so doing, to construct a model which will help to elucidate what happened when the republican ideal posed the problem of the universal^ existence in secular particularity. [i i ] Sir John Fortescue (c. 1390-1479), an English law yer and the kind of amateur of philosophy who helps us understand the ideas of an age by coarsening them slightly, wrote the greatest of his works, the De Laudibus Legum A nglie (In Praise o f the Law s o f England) about 1468-1471. A t that time he was in exile with the Lancastrian claimants to the English throne, from whom he held the title of Lord Chancel­ lor, but it is of far more significance that he had served before exile as Lord Chief Justice of the K in g’s Bench, the premier office of the English common law. If at a later time it was said of Francis Bacon that “ he wrote philosophy like a Lord Chancellor,” it could with equal truth be said of Fortescue that— not for the last time in English his­ tory— he wrote philosophy like a Lord Chief Justice. The two great legal offices made different demands on the application of intellect to society, and encouraged correspondingly different social philosophies.10 10.See the present writer’s studies of Sir Matthew Hale (1609-1676) in The

9

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

The D e Laudibus, at all events, is a dialogue on the study of English law between a Prince of W ales and a Lord Chancellor of England, both in exile. The chancellor seeks to persuade the prince that he should study the laws of the country he is to rule, as well as martial exercises; and when the prince objects that English law is known to be of such technicality that professional lawyers immerse themselves for years in its details before presuming to practice it,11 we encounter a reply that introduces us straightway to the central philosophical problem of our subject. The chancellor replies, in effect, that every branch of study is approached by gaining a grasp of its principles. These are called maxims in mathematics, paradoxes in rhetoric, rules of law (regula juris) in civil law, and maxims, once again, in the study of the laws of England. If the prince gains a knowledge of these maxims, he will deserve to be called learned in the laws of England, even though he never applies his knowledge to exact points of legal interpretation, which he will normally leave to his judges, serjeants-at-law, and other professional lawyers. The prince is satisfied by this reply, but it remains to be seen what he has gained by it. For in all that Fortescue says of these maxims, it is evident that, like the axioms, paradoxes, and so forth in other sciences, they are the universal, self-evident, undemonstrable principles on which, according to the basic procedures of Aristotelian philosophy, any system of knowledge must rest. T h ey are acquired directly “ b y induction through the senses and the memory” ; they “ are not known by force of argument or by logical demonstrations” ; they are not deduced from one another, or from any antecedent premise; “ there is no rational ground for principles,” but “ any principle is its own ground for holding it.” 32 In all this, Fortescue is quoting direct from the medieval texts of Aristotle, and we have begun to observe the use of a rigorously deductive philosophy b y a mind steeped in the practice of customary law. In the philosophy which Fortescue is outlining here, all rational knowledge is essentially deductive. Knowledge, of whatever kind, starts with the acceptance of certain basic principles, some of which are the foundations of all knowledge as such, while others distinguish knowledge into its various branches and form the bases of the various sciences which they distinguish. T he rational proof of any statement is arrived at by demonstrating that it is the necessary logical conse­ Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge University Press, 1957; N ew York: W . W . Norton, 1967), pp. 170-81, and Politics, Language and Ti?ne (New York: Atheneum, 1971; London, Methuen, 1972), pp. 215-22, 262-64. 11 Sir John Fortescue, De Laudibus Leguin A nglie, ed. and trans. S. B. Chrimes (Cambridge University Press, 1949), ch. v i i , pp. 19-21. 1 2 De Laudibus, ch. vm, pp. 20-23. 10

EXPERIENCE, USAGE AND PRUDENCE

quence of some principle or combination of principles, and from this it follows (a) that there can be no rational proof of any principle, since nothing which can be deduced from a principle is a principle itself, (b) that any branch of knowledge— mathematics, rhetoric, civil law, English law — consists of knowledge of the relevant set of principles and their deducible consequences. Reason in the strict sense of the term is simply that by which we are enabled to perform deductions from principles; induction is the mental process by which we arrive at knowledge of principles; but that by which we recognize what cannot and need not be proved, namely the truth of principles, is neither rea­ son nor induction— intuition, though not used b y Fortescue, is possibly the best word for it. But if we use “ reason” slightly more loosely, to mean that faculty of the mind by which the consequences of princi­ ples are detected and validated, we instantly encounter the central diffi­ culty of Fortescue’s argument with respect to English law. Principles, inescapably, are universal statements; and from universals we can deduce only universals. N o w if English law is to be a rational branch of study, it must consist of certain principles, underived from other principles, and their consequences, which must be true of all English legal situations to which they apply. It is affirmed that English law consists of a series of uniform deductions from certain maxims, with which it is all logically coherent; but what principles (we must now ask) could there be, underived from other principles and intuitively perceived to be self-evident, of which “ England” is the subject? “ E ng­ land” must be the name, either of a unique constellation of factors, or of a member of a class of which there are other members. In the for­ mer case there could be no body of universals concerning it, since you cannot make universal statements concerning a single unique object; in the latter the principles and universals concerning English law would apply also to the law of other members of the class to which “ E ng­ land” belonged. But the prince in Fortescue’s dialogue, when he doubted whether he could study English law, expressed doubt also whether he should study it in preference to civil law, i.e., the law of Rom e; and the chancellor undertook to settle both doubts, that is, to convince him that there existed a readily accessible rational science of English law as distinct from the law of other nations. Fortescue’s pur­ pose seems entangled in contradiction from the start, and the prince’s chance of learning the law by mastering a purely “ English” set of principles appears to be foredoomed. A t a rather later point in the De Laudibus Fortescue declares it to be a universal truth in the study of law that all human laws are either law of nature, or custom, or statutes.13 The law of nature consists of 13 Ibid., ch. xv, pp. 36-37. 11

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

those self-evident principles of justice, and their universally deducible consequences, which are true and have binding force among all men. Human laws may be simply the translation of the commands of natural law into the formalized commands or rules of a particular kingdom. But there is nothing here which need detain the student of specifically English law, for the laws of England, in those points which they sanction b y reason of the law of nature, are neither better nor worse in their judgements than are all laws of other nations in like cases. For, as Aristotle said, in the fifth book of the Ethics, Natural law is that w hich has the same -force among all men. W herefore there is no need to discuss it further. But from now on we must examine what are the customs, and also the statutes, of England, and we will first look at the char­ acteristics of those customs.14 The universal principles of justice are cognizable by reason and, it should seem, it is they which form the maxims on which the science of jurisprudence is founded; they which the prince may learn by the brief exercise of his own reason, while leaving their detailed applica­ tion to his professional servants with their long years of specialized study and experience. But there is nothing specifically “ English” about knowledge of the law of nature, or of that part of English law which is identical with the law of nature or with the corresponding element in the laws of other nations. T o discover what is uniquely English about the laws of England we must turn to what have been described as “ custom and statute,” the two remaining categories into which all human law must fall. It is in these divisions that the law of England is uniquely English, and the law of any nation uniquely itself. In agrarian societies which are highly decentralized and traditional, but which a professionally organized class of literate bureaucrats, obedient to a central direction, is trying to bring under control, it is common— at least in the W est— to find a distinction between unw rit­ ten custom, usage, or tradition, recognized by the king’s servants but recognized as being already established by the spontaneous and tradi­ tional adoption of society itself, and the written commands, edicts, ukases, or statutes as Fortescue calls them, imposed upon society by order of the king and his literati, whether or not these claim to be digesting or m odifying what was previously unwritten tradition. It m ay be observed that the distinction, though clear, is not absolute; it m ay be hard to distinguish between a written judgment, recognizing that such has been and is the law b y virtue of custom, and a written 14 Ibid., ch. xvi (the whole chapter), pp. 38-39. 12

EXPERIENCE, USAGE AND PRUDENCE

decree, ordaining that such is and shall be the law b y virtue of the authority of whoever issues the decree. English lawyers sometimes attempted to distinguish on this basis between unwritten law or lex non scripta, which might be written down but which claimed no authority but that of custom and tradition, and written law, lex scripta or statute, whose authority was that of the author of the writing— normally the king in parliament; but parliament also functioned as a court, whose business was to declare old law (custom) rather than to promulgate new (statute), and in a statute itself the notion of a decla­ ration of custom might survive and render its nature ambiguous. Fortescue’s problem may be resummarized as follows. Customs and statutes together make up the particular laws of any nation. N o w if these are to claim rational justification they must be rationally deducible, or at least contain nothing contrary to what is rationally deducible, from the principles of natural justice; but it is not their deducibility or their rationality which gives them their particular character. T o understand wherein the laws of England differ from those of Rome or France, we must investigate not their rationality— since therein they are identical with those of other nations— but the w ays in which the principles of justice have in them been applied to the special character and circumstances of England. In short, English law contains— as does the law of any nation— an element other than the purely rational, based on the cognition of circumstances and conditions peculiar to England and on the application or adaptation of universal principles to these local and peculiar conditions. Fortescue’s account of this element is found in his seventeenth chap­ ter, which follows immediately, without the interposition of a word, upon the passage last quoted. . . . and we will first look at the characteristics o f those customs. [xvn ] T he kingdom of England was first inhabited b y Britons, then ruled by Romans, again b y Britons, then possessed by Saxons, who changed its name from Britain to England. Then for a short time the kingdom was conquered by Danes, and again by Saxons, but finally b y Normans, whose posterity hold the realm at the pres­ ent time. And throughout the period of these nations and their kings, the realm has been continuously ruled by the same customs as it is now, customs which, if they had not been the best, some of those kings would have changed for the sake of justice or by the impulse of caprice, and totally abolished them, especially the Romans, who judged almost the whole of the rest of the world by their laws. Similarly, others of these aforesaid kings, who possessed the kingdom of England only b y the sword, could, b y that power, *3

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

have destroyed its laws. Indeed, neither the civil laws of the Romans, so deeply rooted by the usage15 of so many ages, nor the laws of the Venetians, which are renowned above others for their antiq­ uity— though their island was uninhabited, and Rome unbuilt, at the time of the origins of the Britons— nor the laws of any Christian kingdom, are so rooted in antiquity. Hence there is no gainsaying nor legitimate doubt but that the customs of the English are not only good but the best. [xvm ] It only remains, then, to examine whether or not the statutes of the English are good . . .1G and with that, indeed, Fortescue has completed all that he has to say in the De Laudibus concerning the grounds for the legitimation of custom. In this chapter, at once very English and very medieval, the particular laws of particular nations are being legitimized b y reference, not to reason and the knowledge of universals, but to antiquity and usage. The laws of Rome and Venice are good because they have been for very long periods in continuous use; the laws of England are the best because they have been in use longest, and the testing to which they have been subjected is underlined by consideration of the succes­ sion of kings, of various ruling races, who had opportunity to have changed them if they had so desired. But we are told nothing of the process of rational reflection by which these rulers decided that the existing laws were the best, nor— strictly speaking— is it possible that we should be. The essentially deductive process which was reason in Aristotelian philosophy was capable of testing a law only b y testing its conform ity to the principles of natural justice, and that test, how ­ ever valuable and necessary, was not the only one. In dealing with the particular laws of particular nations, Fortescue must also ask whether they suit the peculiar character and circumstances of the nation whose life they regulate, and that is what is being tested here. In that context, of course, the laws of England can be “ better” than those o f Rome or Venice only in the sense that they suit the English better than their equivalents suit the Romans or Venetians. H ow is such an elusive com­ parison to be carried out? Since reason is concerned with universals, there must be some other instrument which detects national character and conditions and tests the suitability of national law to these conditions. Such an instrument there is, and it is called usage or experience; but since it is not reason in the fully reflective and ordered sense of the 15 The Latin is “tantorum temporum curriculis . . . in quantum . . . inveterate sunt” (p. 38), but the word usus frequently occurs in Fortescue’s text and is rendered by Chrimes as “usage.” 16 De Laudibus, ch. xvi, pp. 38-41. 14

EXPERIENCE, USAGE AND PRUDENCE

term, it is, though available only to intelligent creatures, unanalytic, uncritical, and inarticulate. It can be, and very often is, unconscious. Men observe usages and customs, or they do not. If the customs are observed, they must be good customs in the sense of well suited to the people who observe them; but the people could not tell you w hy the customs they observe are good or those they abandon bad, not merely because the people are not philosophers, but because the philosopher himself could not tell you. The philosopher can see only the universal aspects of things; there is no method, no self-critical or self-verifying intellectual procedure, vet evolved for dealing with their particular aspects. Consequently, the goodness of a good custom can be inferred from the fact of its preservation; it can hardly be demonstrated, since demonstration consists in deduction from a universal premise, and no such premise can contain the particular character and circumstances of the people whose custom it is. W e cannot give the “ reason” w hy a custom is good or bad; we can only say “ there is reason to believe” that it is good (because preserved) or bad (because abandoned). This is what Edmund Burke— a direct heir of this w ay of thinking— was to call “ prescriptive” or “ presumptive” reasoning. Because a custom or a particular institution had a “ prescriptive” claim— i.e., was already estab­ lished— there was a “ presumption” in its favor; we presumed that it had been found to w ork w ell.17 The longer it had been in existence, the greater the presumption in its favor. T he naivety of Fortescue’s argument that English law is best because oldest should by now be becoming intelligible. There can, according to a strictly deductive conception of reasoning, be no rational mode of dealing with particulars, no rational w ay of proving that a nation has certain characteristics or that its laws suit those char­ acteristics. H o w then can there be any comparative evaluation of legal systems? T he Venetians have testified that their law suits them by retaining it for a very long time; the English have testified to the suita­ bility of their lawT in exactly the same w ay. There is no rational— or, in modern terms, scientific— method of selecting and analyzing the peculiar characteristics of the Venetians and the English respectively, detecting and analyzing the peculiar characteristics of their respective laws and evaluating the latter by measuring them against the former. W e cannot rationally say that (or w h y) English law suits the English better than Venetian law suits the Venetians; wre have only two sets of presumptions, neither of which can be fully stated or rationally demonstrated. W e can, however, have recourse to the last refuge of the social scientist when faced with incommensurables: we can quan17 See, for a theory of presumptive tradition, Politics, Language and Tim e, chs. 6 and 7. 15

THE PROBLEM ANT) ITS MODES

tifv. If the laws of England are indeed older than those of Venice and have been longer in continuous usage, then more men, in more years and more situations, have testified silently in their favor; there is a greater weight of experience, a greater weight of presumption, impel­ ling us to believe them satisfactory to the historic society where they obtain, than exists with regard to the laws of Venice. Such is the rationale of the argument from antiquity, with wThich in this book we shall be much (though indirectly) concerned. It is a direct consequence of the shortcomings of the deductive philosophy. But the prince of the De Laudibus is now seen to have been cheated by his chancellor. He was assured that if he would only learn the principles of English law, he would know enough to understand what his judges and other professional lawyers were doing when they applied these principles to concrete cases. It has turned out, howrever, that the cognition of concrete cases and the discernment of how prin­ ciples are to be applied to them is a sharply different intellectual proc­ ess from the cognition of principles and the deduction of their logical consequences. Indeed, it is scarcely an intellectual process at all; it is a matter of pure trial and error, since the test of a custom’s goodness is not its demonstrable rationality, but the simple fact of its having remained in usage. Therefore the learning of a professional law yer is not to be reduced to a knowledge of principles and their consequences; it is knowledge of what customs have been retained and what the technical, rather than logical, consequences of their retention have been. Customary law is a technical and traditional, rather than a rational structure; and Fortescue is well on the w ay to the later conception— expressed by Sir Edward Coke, another Chief Justice— of English law as “ artificial reason.” Thus you, prince, would marvel at a law yer of England if he told you that a brother shall not succeed in a paternal heritage to a brother not born of the same mother, but that rather the heritage shall descend to a sister of the whole blood or shall fall to the lordin-chief of the fee as his escheat, because you are ignorant of the reason for this law. But the difficulty of such a case does not in the least perturb one learned in the law of England. W herefore . . . you will realise that if by instruction you will understand those laws of which you are now ignorant, you will love them, since they are the best; and the more you reflect upon them, the more agreeably you will enjoy them. For all that is loved transfers the lover into its own nature by usage, wherefore, said Aristotle, Use becomes another nature.1* 18 De Laudibus, ch. v, pp. 14-17. 16

EXPERIENCE, USAGE AND PRUDENCE

It will be argued later on that the last sentence is of great impor­ tance: that in the concepts of “ use” and “ second nature” may be found the beginnings of the historicist doctrine that we become what we do and so make ourselves. But there was not much for the prince to do with English law but love it and permit it to transform his nature. W ords like “ the reason for this law ” and “ since they are the best” consciously beg the question. Such statements were not demonstrable and consequently were above criticism. The prince was in no position to criticize the application of law by his judges, unless reason should tell him that what they were doing was contrary to natural justice. Except in such rare cases, the reason of the law was prescriptive and based on antiquity; he could only accept (and, of course, love) the customs of his kingdom on the presumption that, being ancient, they were good and, being the oldest in the world, they were also the best. The judges knew what the usages of the kingdom were, and his knowl­ edge of natural justice and its consequences not only did not tell him but did not equip him to find out; for the study of customary law was not a scholastic process of rational deduction but— as Coke was to tell James I1!)— a matter of lifelong study in the records and working experience in the courts. It is very possible that Fortescue’s main intention was still to argue that English law was reasonable, in the sense that it could be shown to be consonant throughout its structure with deductions performed from the principles of jurisprudence or the maxims characteristic of common law itself. But there exists in his thought an inexpugnable level at which it appeared that English law was not rational, in the sense that it could never be reconstructed by the performance of any such deductions. Other forms of intelligence than the philosophical, which took longer to learn because they were based on experience rather than study, had been at w ork in its making; and consequently, the prince might hope to admire his judges intelligently, but— once the point was reached at which law had to be considered custom— admire he must. Custom is the fruit of experience, operating at the lowest and least articulate level of intelligence, that of trial and error. O nly experience 19 “Then the king said, that he thought the law was founded upon reason, and that he and others had reason as well as the judges: to which it was answered by me, that true it was, that God had endowed his Majesty with excellent science, and great endowments of nature; but his Majesty was not learned in the laws of his realm of England, and causes which concern the life, or inheritance, or goods, or fortunes of his subjects are not to be decided by natural reason, but by the artificial reason and judgment of law, which law is an art which requires long study and experience before that a man can attain to the knowledge of it” : Coke, Tw elfth Reports, Prohibitions del R oy (12 Co. Rep. 65).

l7

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can establish it; only experience can know it to be good; and the experi­ ence of the mind that recognizes it necessarily rests on the experience of countless other men in past generations, of which the custom itself is the expression. Custom therefore is self-validating; its own existence and its own presumed longevity are the main reasons for presuming it to be good and well suited to the needs and nature of the people, and it peremptorily requires the scrutinizing mind to rest satisfied with the assumptions which it contains about itself. The prince is not equipped to be a critic and reformer of custom for the following rea­ sons: there is no method, other than that of experience itself, by which the intellect can reason from the needs and nature of the people to their customs, or determine scientifically whether the latter are well or ill suited to the former; and since there is only experience, which must be accumulated rather than systematically constructed in the three­ score and ten years of a man’s lifetime, the prince must recognize that his is the experience of one man only, not to be pitted against that of the myriad men of antiquity which has gone to the making of any single custom, let alone the whole body of the customary law of his realm. It is therefore hard for Fortescue’s prince to legislate, for the reason that there is no scientific method of determining what particular laws will suit particular peoples or particular situations. The only method known to the scholastic mind is that of deductive logic, which deals only with universals; the adjudication of the particular must be left to experience, which for the most part issues in customs, and in the immeasurably slow processes of the formation of custom the prince’s intellect has no preeminence. Sometimes, it is true, laws must be pro­ mulgated in shorter time than it takes for a custom to crystallize out from the general mass of behavior, and here we reach the third divi­ sion of legislation according to Fortescue, the category of statute. But here too the dichotomy of reason and experience, and the principle of the quantifiabilitv of experience, operate. Immediately after he has grounded custom upon usage and antiquity, Fortescue says: It only remains, then, to examine whether or not the statutes of the English are good. These, indeed, do not emanate from the will of the prince alone, as do the laws in kingdoms which are governed entirely regally, where so often statutes secure the advantage of their maker only, thereby redounding to the loss and undoing of the sub­ jects. . . . But the statutes of England cannot so arise, since they are made not only by the prince’s will, but also by the assent of the whole realm, so they cannot be injurious to the people nor fail to secure their advantage. Furthermore, it must be supposed that they 18

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are necessarily replete with prudence and wisdom, since they are promulgated b y the prudence not of one counsellor or a hundred only, but of more than three hundred chosen men— of such a num­ ber as once the Senate of the Romans was ruled b y — as those who know the form of the summons, the order and the procedure of parliament can more clearly describe. And if statutes ordained with such solemnity and care happen not to give full effect to the inten­ tion of the makers, they can speedily be revised, and vet not with­ out the assent of the commons and nobles of the realm, in the man­ ner in which they first originated. Thus, prince, all the kinds of the law of England are now plain to you. Y ou will be able to estimate their merits b y your own wisdom, and by comparison with other laws; and when you find none in the world so excellent, you will be bound to confess that they are not only good, but as good as you could wish.20 The dice are as heavily loaded as ever against the capacity of the prince, as a student of comparative legislation, to arrive at any other conclusion, and as heavily against his ability to function as a legislator or critic of legislation, in respect of statute no less than o f custom. Par­ ticular laws— this is the key of the matter— can be framed only by experience, b y usage in the long run and b y prudence in the short; the prince’s experience is only that of one man, as against that of his three hundred counselors, of the body of his subjects now living or the unnumbered dem ocracy of the dead of antiquity (the test of quantifi­ cation makes custom presumptively wiser than statute); and his reason, which tells him only whether custom and statute are in accordance with the principles of natural justice, can after all tell him no more than reason will tell any other animal rationale who possesses it. On every score, then, the prince whose authority is above that of any other man cannot legislate effectively without afforcing his reason and experience with the reason and experience of as many other men as possible, and this is never done better than when he joins with the dem ocracy of the dead to respect the usages of antiquity. Here we have come to one of the pillars supporting Fortescue’s preference for the prince who rules b y law and consent over the prince who rules by his own reason and experience alone. The latter need be no tyrant, but an honest man attempting the impossible and neglecting the help which others can bring him. The whole question, however, deserves to be reviewed in a wider theoretical context. C. H. M cllw ain, in Constitutionalism Ancient and M odern ,21 traced 20 De Laudibus, ch. xvm, pp. 40-41. 21 Ithaca: Cornell University Press, Great Seal Books, 1958, chs. 11 and iv. 19

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

the philosophical distinction between Fortescue’s regnum regale and regnum politicum et regale back to the parting of the wavs followed b y Plato when he wrote the R epublic and by the later Plato and Aris­ totle after him. In the R epublic, Plato raised the question whether the city should be ruled bv law or by the unfettered wisdom of its ideal ruler, and decided in favor of the unrestricted authority of the philosopher-ruler. He did so on the grounds that a law was only a generalization which must be modified to fit the particular case, or else distort the particular case to make the latter fit it, whereas the philosopher possessed an intuitive grasp o f universals which gave him, at one and the same time, an intuitive grasp of the essential character of each particular case. W here a law was like a stiff bar which must be bent to fit each case if it was not to break it, the philosopher’s wrisdom was fluid; it flowed around each case and embraced all its details. But for this to be true, the relation between universals and particulars must be very different from what it is in Fortescue’s medieval Aristotelianism. The doctrine of the Republic involves the existence of the Ideas or Forms of Platonic philosophy, those ideal and perfect intellectual objects which constitute the only real world, to one of which every object in the phenomenal world of our senses corresponds, but of which it is only a derivative and imperfect copy. Knowledge of the Forms is not sense-knowledge, nor is it abstracted or generalized from sense-knowledge; it is attained when the intellect is directly illumi­ nated b y the Form itself, or b y the world of the Forms, as happens to the prisoner in the M yth of the Cave when he escapes from a place where he can see only the shadows of things cast by firelight and emerges into the sunlight where he can see things themselves. Once our intellects have been illuminated b y the Forms, we have complete knowledge of all the phenomenal things derived from them, because derivative reality is illuminated b y the reality from which it is derived. In this w ay— but only in this w ay— the philosopher-ruler can be said to know particular situations and cases better than the general rules of the law can be said to “ know ” them. But in the Statesman and the Law s, McIKvain continued, the later Plato was prepared to consider the possibility of a philosopher-ruler whose knowledge was not knowledge of Forms but consisted in a series o f generalizations from experience. Such a ruler should submit his decisions to be disciplined by laws, since these generalizations could be constructed on a wider basis than was possible to his intellect alone. Governm ent of this kind, however, would necessarily be imperfect, since its knowledge would consist of generalizations abstracted from experience, which must be laboriously reconverted into concrete terms to fit each individual case, wThich in turn might contain elements not 20

EXPERIENCE, USAGE AND PRUDENCE

allowed for in the original generalization. There must be a discontinu­ ity between abstract and concrete, universal generalization and par­ ticular case, in any system of knowledge except that enjoyed by the philosopher of the R ep u b lic; and it could be argued that the lesser breed of ruling intellect must be doubly disciplined b y law, first by the need to submit his individual decisions to the law ’s general rules, secondly b y the necessity to accept some sort of guidance when it came to converting them into particular decisions— for if his only knowledge was of imperfect generalizations, imperfect too must be his understanding of particular cases. Aristotle, in the Politics, developed this line of argument and, dis­ cussing whether wisdom or the law should rule, concluded that only if a philosopher should appear whose intelligence was as far above that of men as theirs was above that of beasts should he rule without the discipline of law; a ruler who possessed the same kind of intelligence as his subjects, but raised to its highest attainable level, could not pos­ sibly be as wise as the laws.22 The implication is that Aristotle was ceasing to believe that the Forms were real, or at least were knowable b y man. Because our bodies located and limited us in space and time, we could know only what our senses and memory told us and what our intellects then did with the information thus received. Ideas were thus “ attained b y induction through the senses and memory,” as Fortescue summarizes Aristotle as saying; they were abstractions from the data. But the abstractions thus arrived at formed propositions, and some of these propositions were self-evident principles; that is, their truth was instantly and intuitively perceived b y the intellect. N o w the history o f Aristotelian metaphysics shows that it was possible to regard these absolute intellectual propositions as real entities, and even as the only ultimate reality created b y G od; the phenomenal world appeared as the exemplification, operation, modification, or even degeneration of its principles, which thus came after all to resemble Platonic Forms more closely. But even if ultimate reality was intellectual, it could be known b y men— rational animals, but animals all the same— only in the shape of concepts abstracted from sense-data and social communica­ tions. Christianity, with its emphasis on the difference between the life of the body and that of the spirit, encouraged the idea that “ now I see through a glass darkly, but then face to face” ; and in Christian Aristotelianism the direct apprehension of intellectual reality was possible only to angels, those created intelligences who sought knowledge of the Creator’s works but, because they were spirits without body, parts, 22 Aristotle, The Politics, ed. and trans. Ernest Barker (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1946), pp. 134-35 (1284a), 126-27 (i282a-b). A ll citations hereafter are to this edition. 21

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

or passions, were unrestricted in space or time and had no need of sense, memory, or inductive generalization, but knew reality immediately and intuitively. Because their knowledge had not to be filtered through the mesh of particularity, it was said that angels were species, not individ­ uals: universal, not particular beings. Tim e, then, was the inescapable condition of particular existence. T he philosopher-king of the Republic was thus transformed into an angel and exiled from this world to another. In Christian thought, of course, the two worlds interpenetrate; but though the church had the task of maintaining certain of the truths of eternity on earth, it was not expected that angels would come to undertake the burden of rule over earthly societies, and it was therefore remote even to impossibility that any earthly ruler would have the intuitive grasp of reality that would enable or entitle him to dispense with laws. Aristotelian thought, in fact, brings us, even in an Athenian and pre-Christian context, to a philosophy of government not too remote from that o f Fortescue. Knowledge is built up b y generalization and abstraction from the data, and some o f these generalizations are seen to be universal propositions whose truth is self-evident and independent of the inductive process. Such principles become the foundations from which reason can derive further propositions, whose truth can be demonstrated b y showing them to be necessary logical consequences of the truth of the first principles. But from abstract universals only abstract universals can be deduced, and if reason is identical with deductive logic, the induc­ tive process cannot be put into reverse. Sooner or later we must face the problem raised b y Plato, that of how the generalization can be made to fit the particular, and we must face it without the aid of a Platonic philosopher who has intuitive and perfect knowledge of the particular and its characteristics. W hat sort of knowledge is possible of the par­ ticular? B y what intellectual instrument can accommodation of the universal and the particular be carried out? So far as human government is concerned, Aristotle’s answer is plain: common experience. This is the meaning of his famous dictum that the judge of a dinner is not the cook, but the man who has to eat it.23 A t the lowest level of unreflecting human intelligence, you need neither the art of the shoemaker nor the science of the chiropodist to know whether or not your boots hurt you; when the shoemaker and the chiropodist have done their best, you will have to tell them the result of their labors; and if, as is particularly likely to happen in affairs of government, there is no shoemaker or chiropodist to help you, it is theoretically possible— though extremely uneconomic— to go on stitch­ ing yourself pairs of boots until, b y trial and error which may have 2Zlbid., p. 126 (1282a).

EXPERIENCE, USAGE AND PRUDENCE

involved your learning so little from your errors that ultimate success is a matter of pure luck, you hit on a pair which do not hurt you. W hen wise rulers have generalized about the needs of the people and the circumstances of their lives, and have framed laws as a result of these generalizations, they should leave it to the people to decide whether the laws actually suit their needs and circumstances; for only thus can the gap between idea and reality be bridged. This may be done b y calling an assembly of the people and asking them whether they think the law will suit them. N o individual may be able to repeat the process of generalization which the rulers have performed, but the sum total of their predictions will probably furnish the rulers with an excellent critique of their law ’s chances of success. This is the case for governing by consent. But the same result may be achieved by usage, by leaving the people free to decide for themselves whether to observe the law or ignore it. The outcome of their decision will not be a pre­ diction— “ W e think this law will or will not suit us” — as it will be if you consult an assembly, but rather a verification: “ The people have retained the usage, so it suits them; they have abandoned it, so it does not.” And the people are quite capable of framing their own customs, without rulers to guide them, simply b y falling spontaneously into patterns of behavior which constitute usages. This is the case for gov­ erning b y custom. T he only objection to legislating b y waiting for popular usages to form themselves is that this takes an extremely long time (though, as we have seen, this has compensating advantages; the older a custom, the more reasons for thinking it suits the people, and the few er for fear­ ing that circumstances may arise in which it does not). It must take a long time, for essentially what we are asking is that one man’s experi­ ence of particular things be added to another’s until a consensus is built up, and that this process be repeated over a time-dimension until the resultant custom can claim the authority of repeated usage and antiquity. But further, this— the slow creation of a custom— is only the most highly developed instance of what all particular legislation, par­ ticular acts of government and particular decisions must be. For if rea­ son is concerned only with deduction and universals there is no science or method of dealing with the particular per se. Each man must use his own judgment of the particulars he happens to know, and the only w ay of extending its sphere beyond the merely private is b y combin­ ing it with other men’s judgments of their particular knowledge. Since there is no organized critique of particular judgment— since it is like (though not identical with) an art rather than a science— one of the few criteria by which one judgment can claim a priori superiority over another is that of the number o f men whose experience has gone to 23

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

its making. The judgment of three hundred men is by that figure more likely to be the best than that of one man; the judgment of many gen­ erations than that of the men now living; the oldest custom than the custom slightly less old. “ T he individual is foolish,” said Burke; “ the multitude, for the moment, is foolish; but the species is wise and, given time, as a species it always acts right.” 24 He meant, incidentally, the biological, not the scholastic, species. All such statements are statements concerning probability, since the rightness of a decision can be demonstrated only insofar as it accords with principles, not particulars— except, indeed, that on the “ second nature” argument, m y customs have become so much a part of m y self that they must be right for me. It is another matter to ask if they are right for m y external circumstances, as opposed to m y personality. But a custom is a particular judgment to which so many men’s experi­ ence testifies, and which has attained so high a degree of consistency under repeated tests over time, that the probability of its continuing to give satisfaction (given the stability of conditions which it presumes and helps to maintain) is very high indeed. H owever, a custom is a judgment which it is possible to view in the longest of long runs, and there must be many judgments which have to be made with the con­ currence of few er men’s experience. Burke’s “ individual” and “ multi­ tude for the moment” have both to make decisions, although both are “ foolish” in the relative sense that the quantity of experience and knowledge of particulars that goes to the making of their decisions is measurably less than is available to the “ species given time.” The deci­ sions of the “ multitude for the moment” are Fortescue’s statutes, and the virtue displayed in making them is what he calls “ prudence.” The “ proof” — it is not, of course, a demonstration— of a custom is its antiq­ uity, and “ prudence” might be defined as the ability to formulate statutes which will stand the test of time and acquire the authority and antiquity already enjoyed by customs. But prudence is also the virtue displayed by the individual in making his decisions, for in the last analysis it is nothing less than the ability to make such use of one’s experience, and that of others, that good results may be expected to follow. Aquinas defines art as “ right reason about things to be made (factibilium ),” prudence as “ right reason about things to be done (agibilium ),” and some modern translators render ratio as “ judgment,” so as to minimize the difficulty of distinguishing between speculative 24 Edmund Burke, Works (London: George Bell and Sons, Bohn’s Libraries edi­ tion, 1877), vi, 147; notes for a speech On a Motion Made in the House of Com­ mons, May 1782, for a Committee to Enquire into the State of the Representation of the Conmions in Parliament. Cf. Politics, Language and Tim e, pp. 226-27. 24

EXPERIENCE, USAGE AND PRUDENCE

ratio which proceeds from principles and practical ratio which pro­ ceeds toward ends.25 He continues b v quoting Cicero as mentioning “ three other parts of prudence, namely memory of the past, under­ standing of the present and foresight of the future,” and concludes that these “ are not virtues distinct from prudence,” but “ integral parts or components.” 20 Prudence, it should now be evident, was the present and future, where custom was the perfect, tense o f experience. In cus­ tom, experience judged what had proved good and satisfactory; it judged also what had proved adapted to the particular nature, or “ genius,” of the people, and this judgment was likely to be self-fulfilling, since use and custom created this “ second nature” as well as eval­ uating it— the past was perfect indeed. In statute experience judged what further experience was likely to confirm, but should in theory do this only where custom could not be shown to have done its work already. W hen in the course of human events, unstable and fluctuating in time as they were, a contingency arose which was not already inte­ grated into usage, the first steps must be taken toward attending to that integration. Statute was based upon experience and expected the con­ firmation of further experience; it was therefore a step taken at a moment when a new emergency had arisen a number of times, and experience had accumulated to the point where the process of gen­ eralizing it into custom could begin. Experience, in the shape of pru­ dence, perform ing this generalization, was Janus-faced; it bridged the gap between innovation and memory, statute and custom, present, future, and past. But what of the very first response to a contingency, the action taken for the first time? In this connection M cllw ain was led to estab­ lish his famous if controversial distinction between jurisdictio (the saying of the law ) and gubernaculum (the holding of the tiller).27 He rightly saw that the first response to contingency formed part of pru­ dential theory, but that it could be only indirectly if at all grounded upon experience. Let something happen for the first time. Either it bears no resemblance whatever to any previous occurrence, in which case we have no language for it and no w ay of dealing with it; or it resembles previous occurrences sufficiently to appear to belong to a class of such occurrences, but presents sufficient characteristics (or combinations of characteristics) of its own to appear what we uneasily term sui generis or unique. If characteristics o f the latter sort prepon­ derate, it will be inappropriate to summon a council of elders and pool 25 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (Blackfriars: N ew York and Lon­ don), vol. 23 (1969), ia-2ae, question 57, 4 (p. 51). 2QI b i d 57, 6 (pp. 57, 61). 27 Mcllwain, op.cit. (above, n. 21), pp. 77^. 25

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

their experience; the thing must be dealt with on the basis of its new­ ness, which will almost certainly appear coterminous with the speed with which it comes upon us and demands a response. If time is the dimension of change, velocity is directly proportionate to unfamiliaritv. The unprecedented event, therefore, must be dealt with b y one man who did not have time to summon his council; but since it could not be dealt with by experience, dealing with it was unlikely to issue in statutes or general prudential statements by which further events of the same class could be dealt with. T h ey must wait until the emergency has been repeated a number of times and was no longer entirely unprecedented. Given the fluctuations of human affairs, there were occasions when normative judgment and statute were inappropriate; the problem was too new, too unfamiliar, there was not enough time; but given the assumptions which underlay the concept of “ experience,” the moment when statute would be appropriate would fairly surely come. M cllwain therefore found it possible to arrange the governing powers of a medieval king along a spectrum leading from jurisdictio to gubernaculum. A t one end the decisions of experience had already been made and the monarch had only to say what they had been, to exercise memory to the exclusion of other aspects of prudence; his own experience need make no contribution to custom and he took no initiative of his own. A t the various intermediate stages, as unfamiliar­ ity and the required speed of response concurrently increased, more was demanded of prudence by w ay of inputs to the custom-forming process; the king took advice of few er counselors, relied more upon his own prudence, but made decisions whose generality, permanence, and binding force as laws correspondingly decreased. Finally, the point was reached where unfamiliarity was total, response must be instanta­ neous, and there could be only one hand on the tiller; the monarch was absolute in the sense that his decisions were bound neither by custom nor b y counsel, but they did not, because they could not, instantly become general laws of conduct. O nly repetition and further experience could make them that. This is to state the jurisdictio-gubernaculum sequence in a highly simplified and idealized form, which might indeed have surprised its author; and M cllw ain’s critics have often asked whether his thesis does not oversim plify the facts of medieval government. Incautiously han­ dled, it tends to produce theory not unlike that found so unsatisfactory in early Stuart England: that there w ere a royal power limited by law and a royal power not limited b y law, with no necessary contradiction between them; and, following Harrington in the seventeenth century28 28 Oceana (1656): “ . . . no other than a wrestling match, wherein the king, as he has been stronger, has thrown the nobility, or the nobility, as they have been 26

EXPERIENCE, USAGE AND PRUDENCE

and Hume in the eighteenth,29 some modern writers have argued that medieval government was both less coherent and, under pre-Tudor conditions, more flexible than this would suggest.80 But it seems one thing to argue that the various forms o f jurisdictio and gubernaculum were not so far institutionalized as to be clearly distinct, another to argue that the mode of thought which the words convey was not the principal or only scaffolding of theory available to medieval minds thinking about government. N o w that we have stated it in a form presenting government as a series of devices for dealing with contin­ gent time, we can see that the structures of which it consists are openended, no more to be distinguished from one another than the moments of past, present, and future into which we organize time. It thus becomes less surprising that medieval minds could speak of custom both as established b y royal or ministerial action and as existing from uncreated antiquity; that the distinction between statutes as making new law and as declaring old were both apparent and habitually slurred over; that the distinction between the gubernaculum uttering an ad hoc decision, confined to a single emergency, and the gubernaculum estab­ lishing a rule possessing some degree of generality and to that degree binding in futurity ( “ law ” ), could not be maintained in practice. The Janus-like character of experience, of the present as a moment in time organized solely b y sequential memory, accounts in principle for all these things. W e are concerned here somewhat less with what happened in gov­ ernment than with the deficiencies of the conceptual system to which government must appeal. Chief Justice Hengham on his bench knewT well enough how to make new statute law by reinterpreting old;31 but Chief Justice Fortescue in his study could give no theoretical account stronger, have thrown the king. . . . where the laws were so ambiguous that they might be eternally disputed and never reconciled. . . .” John Toland (ed.), The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington (London, 1771), pp. 63, 69. 29 History of England (ed. of 1762), vol. v, ch. 1, p. 14: . . the several con­ stituent parts of the gothic governments, which seem to have lain asleep for so many ages, began, every where, to operate and encroach on each other.” 30 Donald W . Hanson, From Kingdom to Commonwealth: the developme?7t of civic consciousness in English political thought (Cambridge, iMass.: Harvard University Press, 1970). See especially chs. 4-7, for a critique of the Mcllwainian tradition. 31 See Hengham’s words to a pleader (Hanson, p. 207): “Do not gloss the statute; we know it better than you, for we made it, and one often sees one statute undo another.” Cf. T .F .T . Plucknett, The Legislation of Edw ard I (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1949), pp. 72-74. Hanson further (pp. 220-22) seeks to show that Fortescue did not make statute inferior to custom in the sense of being limited by it. But Hanson does not distinguish between the authority of statute and the prudence of its content. 27

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

of how this was done which did not reabsorb Hengham and his inno­ vating prudence into the world of experience, custom, and retrospec­ tion. And at one end of the spectrum, where the concept of experience failed altogether and the contingency and its response were acknowl­ edged as unique, nothing was left but m ystery. W ith the policy deci­ sion we entered the sphere of pure gubernaculum, at the furthest remove from that of customary jurisdiction; in it all rulers were acknowledged to be at once absolute and highly insecure. In matters of policy, the king and his counselors must proceed with nothing but their own prudence and experience to guide them. It was their pro­ fession to do so; their lives were one long training in it; God, who had laid this task on them, might of his grace assist them to perform it; and they might develop a marvelous skill in the exercise of what was essen­ tially a professional “ m ystery” or art. It was on their expertise in state­ craft, in the arcana imperii or secrets of power, in judging the fluctua­ tions of times and seasons, events, circumstances, and human wills, that outstandingly successful rulers, like Philip II of Spain— E l Prudente— or Elizabeth I of England, based their claim to a mysterious and quasi­ divine authority. The sphere in which they operated was that of the inscrutable providence of God, and success in that sphere seemed prov­ idential; it argued that they were divinely commissioned to exercise power. But the statecraft of pure policy was detached from either jurisdiction or legislation, for it had nothing to do with the establish­ ment and maintenance of rules of law. It was a mysterious, in a sense an irrational, art of coping with the unique, the contingent, and the unforeseen, at the point where all hope must be abandoned of bringing things under legal control. But where experience could be mobilized in the form of custom or consent, and general rules could be estab­ lished and interpreted, government became much less an arcane and mysterious art and— subject always to the sharp distinction between reason and experience— much more a rational method or science. On the assumptions used b y men like Fortescue, the king’s statecraft did not entitle him to be either a judge or a legislator; the demands of government were not the same. He might have the prudence to be a policy-maker, where prudence was at a premium and experience at a discount; he quantitatively lacked the experience to be judge or legisla­ tor, as must any one man who did not call on the experience and the prudence of others. The pure gubernaculum was pure m ystery; and as long as experience remained the only means of generalizing about particular cases and testing the application of universals to them, jurisdictio and legislation b y consent must remain the only methods of framing and administer­ ing laws that would stand up to intellectual scrutiny. Yet this philoso­ 28

EXPERIENCE, USAGE AND PRUDENCE

phy of government must fail to cover satisfactorily those situations where gubernaculum was involved in jurisdictio, where the king was felt to be personally concerned in justice and legislation and charged, by reason of his office, with a responsibility for their proper perform­ ance which was not like that of any other man. Argument like Fortes­ cue’s tended to strip him of any intellectual capacity commensurate with his office and leave him— as the chancellor of the De Laudibus left his prince— a mere respectful spectator of what his judges were doing, no wiser than any other intelligent layman. But no theory of gubernaculum seemed able to provide the king with a stable vet unique role in justice and legislation, since it was inherent in the whole philoso­ phy we have been reviewing that the gubernacidum was in the last analysis a craft rather than a science, concerned with the unique rather than the recurrent, with the management of policy rather than the establishment of laws. Since the king was charged with this terribly difficult task, he enjoyed an authority analogous with or based upon that of G o d ’s providence; since, too, there were points of contact between it and what was done in councils and courts of law, there were moments when the king, face to face wTith his counselors or his judges, might speak “ as the roaring of a lion,” with the terrible and quasi-divine authority of gubernacidum . Then he might not be gain­ said or resisted; then he might set aside laws, for short intervals, by the same authority. But when it came to decreeing judgment, to promul­ gating statutes, and particularly to the technicalities of customary juris­ prudence, the voice of the lion was stilled and the inconvenient fact reemerged that laws were made by reason and experience, of neither of wrhich had the king more than other men; James I and Coke wTere face to face again. W hat the king had in greater measure than other men was authority, but authority is ceasing at this point to be grounded upon any theory of human knowledge. W e may conveniently appeal here to W alter Ullmann’s thesis of the “ descending” as opposed to the “ ascending” pow er;32 the ruler’s authority might come to him from his share in political intelligence (Fortescue’s politice) or it might come to him from above (regaliter), from God himself conceived as rex rather than lex, as will rather than reason. Even this Fortescue was disposed to minimize b y equating it with the exercise of lex naturae, the law of universals perceivable by common human reason; but in particulars the divine authority was unshared to the point where it became a m ystery how the king received it, for the precise reason that it was providen­ tial. O nly G od from the nunc-stans perceived the full meaning of the 32 Walter Ullmann, Principles of Government and Politics in the M iddle Ages (London: Methuen, 1961). 29

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

sequence of particular events, and it was easier to conceive of him as willing it. Providence was the name of his will as directing this sequence, at least as that will was perceived bv men from inside time; and to them, who had no nunc-stans, it was inscrutable and mysterious. As the roaring of a lion, the king spoke with authority that descended to him from God; his authority therefore became inscrutable, m ysteri­ ous, and not to be resisted. But the gift of authority added nothing to the faculties of his time-bound intelligence; it was a hierocratic rather than a secular phenomenon; and this is w hy Jean Bodin, like many another theorist of “ absolute m onarchy,” is to be found saying both that as a matter of authority, the king may set aside custom whenever he so wills, and that as a matter of prudence and even wisdom, he should will to do so only on the rarest of occasions.38 Even the king did not fully bridge the gap between God and man; and it seems to follow that authority left prudence behind it at a point where it left the domain of contingent time as perceived by human memory and entered that of time as shaped b y the will and providence of God. But when providence decreed positive laws binding upon men in general, it operated from Sinai rather than Rome or Byzantium; its acts were not those of a human lawgiver. Before the king or the community could fully assert a power of positive legislation, there must be a theory vesting men with the ability to create new orders in the domain of secular history. In discovering w hy such a theory was still lacking, we have next to turn to a fuller exploration of the conspectus of providen­ tial time. 33 M. J. Tooley (ed. and transj, Six Books of the Commonwealth by Jean Bodin, abridged and translated (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, n.d.), pp. 43-44, 123-28.

3°

C H A P T E R II

T H E PROBLEM AN D ITS MODES b

)

Providence, Fortune and Virtue

i t is a d i a l e c t i c a l p a r a d o x that while the Christian doctrine of salva­ tion ultimately made the historical vision possible, for centuries it operated to deny that possibility. The Greek and Roman intellects saw little reason to expect anything very new to happen in the human future, and doctrines of cyclical recurrence or the supremacy of chance ( tyche or fortuna) arose and interpenetrated— though we must beware of exaggerating or simplifying their importance— to express this lack of expectation, which sometimes occasioned world-weariness and angst.1 W ithin these empty-seeming schemes, however, there was room for much acute study of political and military happenings, and the actions of men did not lose interest— rather, perhaps, the reverse— when it was thought that they would some day, in the ordinary or the cosmological course of things, be repeated. The advent of the savior monotheisms, however, reorganized and transformed time b y making it an aspect of events whose significance was in eternity. God had covenanted with men, and the covenant would some day be fulfilled; man had been created, he had fallen, God had begun action intended to bring about his redemption, and this process would at a point in time to come be carried to its final completion. All these propositions denoted temporal events; the past or the future tense must be used in stating them; and yet the significance of every one of them was extrahistorical in that it denoted a change in the relations between men and that which was outside time altogether. Tim e was organized around the actions which an eternal agent performed within it; these actions formed a sequence whose meaning appeared in time and gave time meaning; but since the meaning of the actions lay outside time, it fol­ lowed that time acquired meaning from its relation to the eternal. It might even seem that man entered time at his departure from Eden,* and that the sequence of acts which constituted sacred history were

1 See n. 3 to ch. 1, above. On fortuna as a goddess and the object of an actual cult, see John Ferguson, The Religions of the Roman Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970). 31

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

intended to bring time ultimately to an end and consummate its mean­ ing at the moment of transcending and terminating its existence. His­ tory, in short, acquired meaning through subordination to eschatology. T h e patristic intellect thus came very often to see the individual life as involved in two separately visible time sequences. On the one hand was that formed by the actions and events that had separated men from God and were now leading to their reunion; most of these had occurred at moments in the past, theoretically and often specifically datable in terms of the chronologies of recorded human history, but some were of course expected by believers at moments in the future which could not be reliably dated and which it might not even be legitimate to seek to date. This raised the problem of the eschatological present, of the religious life which was to be led in the interval of expecting the fulfillment of the program of redemption; and once it was accepted that this present might cover many lifetimes and genera­ tions, the interval was necessarily filled by the other time-sequence visible to human perceptions. This was what the patristic vocabulary termed the saeculum 2 and the modern intellect prefers to call history; human time organized around happenings in the social world, which the Greco-Rom an mind saw overwhelm ingly as political and military, and the mind of late antiquity, not surprisingly, largely in terms of the rise and fall of empires. T he question must now arise of how, or whether, these two independently perceived sequences (or histories “ sacred” and “ secular” ) might be related to each other. T o civic intel­ ligences— and the Christian minds of late antiquity were very civic— intensely involved in what befell their urban, provincial, and imperial societies, it must seem that happenings in this realm were in some w ay bound up with G o d ’s intentions for the redemption of men; and indeed, in the perpetual struggle to keep a world-renouncing asceti­ cism distinct from a w orld-denying dualism, it might be dangerous to deny that God was somehow present and concerned in the happenings of secular history and directing them to soterial ends. The saeculum was in the drama of salvation; might it not also be of it? Furthermore, there were— and had been at least from the times when the books of Daniel and Revelations were accepted into the Christian canon— schemes of prophecy, in the sense of utterances acknowledged as inspired and foretelling events which might not yet have occurred; and in these the eschatological completion of the program of redemp­ tion and the end of time itself were described in terms suggesting the catastrophe of cities and empires in a drama of human history. It was therefore neither impossible nor illegitimate to believe that “ secular” 2 Throughout this chapter I am indebted to R. A. Alarkus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge University Press, 1970). 32

PROVIDENCE, FORTUNE AND VIRTUE

history had indeed been the subject of prophecy, and that the prophet or interpreter of prophecy might “ read” secular events in such a w ay as to discern the program of redemption in them, and them as part of that program. But the construction of a prophetic key to history was not historiography in any autonomous sense of the term. Insofar as it consisted of the reading and application of prophetic books like the two just mentioned, the language it employed was heavily oracular and symbolic, and the w orking out of associations and identifications between the events described in prophecy and the events experienced and perceived in the saeculum necessitated the construction of a num­ ber of secondary vocabularies of symbolization. These proved capa­ ble of relating a number of secondary sequences to the prophetic sequences, and the latter consequently ascended from the status of symbol to that of type: the primordial arcane reality capable of being repeatedly typified in a number of independently existing sequences. In this w ay eschatology retained its prim acy over history. N ot only was the latter intelligible only as a pattern of the process of redemp­ tion, but the latter was capable of being patterned over and over again— the drama capable of being rehearsed many times— in sequences some of which were not those of secular history at all, but of the indi­ vidual soul’s pilgrimage or of abstract nonhistorical occurrences, while historical events themselves might stand in a typical, not a historical, relation to each other. The language of prophecy, in short, constantly tended to retreat from the narrative prose of history into the poetry of a cosmic symbolism; the same patterns were repeated on many levels, instead of unique events succeeding one another in unrepeatable sequences, and the intellect that could deal with the particular only by relating it to the universal took fresh hold in this medium as in that of philosophy.3 Nevertheless, the historical event or phenomenon could be related to the eschatological without losing its historical uniqueness, if it could be directly related to the final, unrepeatable and hence unique redemp­ tion of all mankind; but it was this procedure which the patristic intel­ lect, in the person of Augustine, was to reject decisively and relegate to the underworld of heterodoxy. The language of Daniel and Revela­ tions, it was discovered, could be used in more than one w ay to denote structures of membership to which the Christian might belong and which he might visualize as playing a role in eschatological drama. Triumphant Christians in the reigns of Constantine or Theodosius 3 One result could be that the linear sequences of prophecy in the strict sense became merged with cyclical sequences reflecting the repetitions of types. See, e.g., John W . O’Malley, Giles of Viterbo on Church and Reform ; A Study in Re7iaissance Thought (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968). 33

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

might see the Christian empire and its church as constituting a prophe­ sied act of God in history and as pointing directly to some eschato­ logical fulfillment; but militant puritans in Africa saw the need to maintain a church free o f compromise with secular authority so clearly that they insisted that salvation was to be had only in a Christian associ­ ation independent of both empire and its ecclesiastical collaborators.4 Salvation was in society and history, but in a history vet to come and to be perfected only at the end of time; meanwhile the false church and the secular empire that maintained and falsified it were to be identified among the hostile and diabolic agencies with which the symbolism of the prophetic books abounded. In this apocalyptic separatism— the cre­ ation out of eschatology of a counterhistory expected in a future— we have that millennialism or millenarism which Christians in all ages have used to express their rebellions against established churches wielding secular power or being wielded bv it. The response of Augustine— and the tradition which followed him— was to renounce both the imperial and the sectarian versions of apoca­ lypticism and to effect a radical divorce between eschatology and his­ tory. The Christian’s relation to the finality of redemption consisted in his membership of the civitas D ei, a society in communion with God and consequently existing, with him, rather out of time than in occa­ sional descents into it; and since no civitas terrena could ever be identi­ cal with the civitas D ei, salvation was to be found in membership nei­ ther of a Christian empire fulfilling G o d ’s will in the course of visible history, nor of an apocalyptic antichurch expecting to be the vehicle of his will at history’s end. N o doubt there would come an end of the redemptive process in time and the Christian might hope to be raised to be of a company of saints on that day; but his salvation was not to be the outcome of a historical process, or of his participation in a pat­ tern of life conceptualized as involving such a process. Civil society and its history indeed existed and were necessary; but they were radically imperfect even to their own ends— the ends of human justice— and cer­ tainly did not suffice to redeem man in his relation to G od .5 T he acts of redemption were performed b y G od in time and could be seen as constituting a sacred history; but they were not necessarily performed through or upon the structures of civil society, and consequently man’s redemption could not be the result of secular history, or of the apoca­ lyptic antihistory of an antisocietv which had fallen into the error 4 Markus, op.cit., ch. 2, “ Tempora Christiana: Augustine’s Historical Experi­ ence,” and pp. u of. See also W .H .C. Frend, The Do?iatist Church (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1952). 5 Markus, chs. 3 and 4, uCivitas Terrena: the Secularisation of Roman History” and “Ordinata est res public a: the Foundations of Political Authority.” 34

PROVIDENCE, FORTUNE AND VIRTUE

of supposing that it was society and history which needed to be redeemed. But if salvation was for individuals, and individual lives did not span the whole of history, the ends of time were not all located at the end of time. The eschatological vision became, in the Augustinian perspective, a vision of something in part extra-historical. It might seem that the individual’s salvation or damnation took place at the hour of his death, the moment of his departure from time into eternity; the historical eschaton, to be expected at the end of time, was rather the resurrection of his body, to complete his joy or suffering in the condi­ tion to which he had been adjudged. In Dante, w riting after nine cen­ turies of Augustine’s influence, it appears that the damnation and per­ haps also the salvation, in which the spirits are beheld, are not yet perfected since the resurrection of the body and the end of time are still to come.'1 Purgation may be completed— as Statius moves on to paradise— before that moment comes. This separation of salvation and society, redemption and history, soul and body, sundered but did not abolish the problem of the eschato­ logical present. It became a problem to account for the state of the soul between the death and resurrection o f the body, but a radical heresy to solve this problem by doctrines of mortalism or psvchopannychism, which asserted that the being or the experience of the soul were suspended during the remainder of secular time; for this denied the extra-temporal nature of membership in the civitas Dei and consequently of that civitas itself.7 W ithin the saeculum, there remained the problem of assigning meaning to the social and historical events experienced b y individuals throughout the remembered past and hence­ forth to the end of time. If these could not be known as possessing any specific eschatological significance, there was no other w ay of assigning meaning to them; the saeculum was nothing other than the dimension of man’s fall— his cumulative if not progressive damnation— and the only historical events that had meaning within it were those designed to reverse the consequences o f which it consisted. If redemp­ tion was not to be seen as operating through social and historical events, these were not to be seen as possessing either sacred or rational signifi­ cance in the light of which they could be explained. Yet the saeculum must not be dismissed as simply meaningless. The events of the redemp­ tive process took place in the same time-series— all that was lacking was the means of relating sacred and secular events— and no part of the Christian universe, not even hell itself, could be seen as without 6 Inferno, vi, io o -iii; x, 94-108; Paradiso, xiv, 10-18, 37-66. 7 S. H. Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1962); Pocock, “Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes,” in Politics, Language and Tim e, ch. 5. 35

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

meaning. It could not be denied that God was present and active in secular history; all that was denied was that we could identify secular events with the fulfillment of his purposes. It could not therefore be denied that secular history was directed by God to our ultimate redemption; it could only be denied that we could know, or should seek to know, how this was being done. Since, in the Augustinian per­ spective, history has not been the subject of prophecy, the problem of living in the historical present is the problem of living with an unre­ vealed eschatology. Y et Christian men continued, in one w ay and another, to be Romans: civic beings, intensely concerned with the events of political history, the civil and military happenings which befell them and of which they from time to time asked God the meaning. Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae is of course the classic of this branch of literature; it states, in one of the most-read books of W estern history, so many of the key themes of the present study that it can usefully be analyzed once again, and the question how far its author’s thought was fully Christianized m ay be passed over in view of the centuries of Christian readership it enjoyed. A Roman aristocrat in the service of a Gothic king, Boethius fell from power, was imprisoned, and in due course put to death; it was presumably during imprisonment that he wrote the w ork which complains against, and reconciles him to, a fate perhaps worse than he anticipated. The D e Consolatione is not a w ork of political philoso­ phy, but it is the philosophy of a political man. Boethius is complain­ ing against the loss of a power he believes he has used for good and the oppressions unjustly inflicted on him by others misusing power. He therefore speaks for all who felt— as it was not un-Augustinian to feel— that men must act in the sphere of the civitas terrena even though they must act without illusions; and there are passages which state the ancient ethic commanding a man of virtue to act so that his actions may be the occasion of virtue in others, and which indicate that there are virtues which rust and decay unless expressed in action.8 But to act in politics is to expose oneself to the insecurities of human power systems, to enter a world of mutability and peripeteia whose history is the dimension of political insecurity; and it is of the utmost signifi­ cance to our subject that the name which Boethius gives to this dimen­ sion is Fortune. Fortuna— the Latin had become in large part assimi­ lated to the Greek tyche— was a word of complex meanings, and in opposing virtue to fortune Boethius was appealing to a long-standing tradition of discourse, which, however, he proceeded to set in a Chris­ tian context. In the senatorial ethos of republican and imperial Rom e,9 8 De Consolatione Philosophiae, i, iv; n, vii; iv, ii. 9D. C. Earl, The Moral and Political Tradition of Rome (Ithaca: Cornell Uni-

36

PROVIDENCE, FORTUNE AND VIRTUE

jortuna had rather the meaning of luck than of chance: a man might be lucky (felix or faustus) in the sense that there was something about his personality that seemed to command favorable circumstances; but the element of chance was acknowledged in the recognition that luck could not be counted upon, and that circumstances could be neither predicted nor controlled. The bar aka, mana, or charisma (to use terms from other cultures) o f the successful actor thus consisted both in the quality of personality that commanded good fortune and in the quality that dealt effectively and nobly with whatever fortune might send; and the Roman term for this complex characteristic was virtus. Virtue and fortune— to Anglicize them— were regularly paired as opposites, and the heroic fortitude that withstood ill fortune passed into the active capacity that remolded circumstances to the actor’s advantage and thence into the charismatic felicitas that mysteriously commanded good fortune. This opposition was frequently expressed in the image of a sexual relation: a masculine active intelligence was seeking to dominate a feminine passive unpredictability which would submissively reward him for his strength or vindictively betray him for his weak­ ness. Virtus could therefore carry many of the connotations of virility, with which it is etym ologically linked; vir means man. A term which was originally, and largely remained, part of the ethos of a political and military ruling class, virtus became assimilated to the Greek arete and shared its conceptual development. From the meaning of “ civic excellence” — some quality respected b y other citizens and productive of leadership and authority over them— arete had been refined, b y Socrates and Plato, to mean that moral goodness which alone qualified a man for civic capacity, which could even exist with­ out it and render it unnecessary, and which, at the highest levels of Platonic thinking, rendered existence and the universe intelligible and satisfactory. A rete and virtus alike came to mean, first, the power by which an individual or group acted effectively in a civic context; next, the essential property which made a personality or element what it was; third, the moral goodness which made a man, in city or cosmos, what he ought to be. This diversity of meanings was carried by “ vir­ tue” and its equivalents in various languages down to the end of Old W estern thinking; the word is of obvious importance in any book organized around the figure of Machiavelli. Boethius, whose thought is so strikingly Platonic and neo-Platonist as to render the quality, if not the fact, of his Christianity debatable, opposes virtus to fortuna in a w ay which both brings out the diverse versity Press, 1967); Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, Galaxy Books, 1957).

37

THE PROBLEM A M ) ITS MODES

Roman, Platonic, and Christian connotations of virtus and transmits the use of jortuna and the virtus-jortuna polarity to subsequent centuries of Augustinian Christianity. That is, as a person in his own dialogue he complains10 that his senatorial virtus, which led him to engage in poli­ tics in the hope of doing good, has exposed him to the insecurities of the power struggle, symbolized as jortuna. But his complaint is theodical rather than political; he does not ask the reasons for his failure as a politician, but inquires how God, who is perfect virtue, has permit­ ted virtus to become jortuna s prey. Augustine wrould hav^ replied simply that men must expect injustice if they insist upon acting in the fallen city; Boethius, more engaged politically and more Platonic in his thinking, is in search of a perspective from which it can be under­ stood how the heavenly city permits the earthly to exist. But in employing jortuna to symbolize the insecurities of the saeculum, he is carrying out a powerful synthesis of languages which will perpetu­ ate the Roman and political conception of virtus in the very act of rendering it questionable. A benign female figure, Philosophy, now appears and sets about consoling Boethius. Her intention is to explain aw ay Fortune by endowing him writh an understanding of history as part of G o d ’s purposes, so that the virtus he acquires to resist Fortune’s malignity will be philosophical and contemplative rather than political and active; but it is in the Athenian tradition that the political is not eliminated by the simple substitution of contemplation for action. T o follow Boethius’s problem we must bring out some of the significances inherent in the figure so central to his thought. Fortune is, first of all, the circumstantial insecurity of political life. H er symbol is the wheel, by which men are raised to power and fame and then suddenly cast down by changes they cannot predict or con­ trol. It is engagement in the affairs of the civitas terrena which com­ mits us to the pursuit of power and so to the insecurities of jortuna; but if happenings in the world of power-centered human relationships are of all things the least predictable and those we most desire to pre­ dict, the political symbol of jortuna is thus able to stand for Plato’s phenomenal world, the image created by our senses and appetites, in which we see only particular things succeeding one another and are ignorant of the timeless principles which give them reality. Plato did not make use of the symbol of tyche in the R epublic, but in Boethius’s use of jortuna we see it to be part of the profoundly political nature of the W estern vision that the phenomenal world of sense-illusion is also the political world of the interpersonal city. Tim e, furthermore, is the dimension of them both: as things seem to succeed one another because we do not see the timeless reality to which they belong, so 10 De Consolatione, i, iv. 38

PROVIDENCE, FORTUNE AND VIRTUE

the turnings of the wheel are felt to our bitter insecurity because we act in the civitas terrena, not the civitas Dei. It is now Philosophy’s task to convince Boethius that saeculum and jortuna— the unpredictabilities of power in a world of politics— are aspects of phenomenal and histori­ cal unreality, but that a perspective exists from which all is seen to be real. She does this by setting up the doctrine later known as that of the nunc-stans or eternal now.11 T o God who is eternal all moments in time are simultaneously visible; the entire secular pattern is discerned, and decreed, as a whole and problems of succession and prediction do not exist. The historical world is visible in simplicity, unity, and per­ fection and is directed by G o d ’s will and intelligence (which are one) toward the redemption of men, which he can see in its accomplishment. It follows— the central assertion of the De Consolatione— that “ all for­ tune is good fortune,” 12 or rather that Fortune is swallowed up in the twin concepts of Providence and Fate. Providence is that perfection of the divine vision in which God sees to (or, to human intellects, fore­ sees) all circumstantial things; Fate is the perfection of the pattern in which he decrees and perceives them.18 W hat we sense as jortuna is our imperfect experience of the perfection of history. In a later but closely related rhetoric, it became more usual to speak of Providence as the inscrutable course of things directed to our redemption by an intelligence we could not share, and b y a further figure as that aspect of the divine intelligence which directed particulars and phenomena while perceiving universals and ideas; and in this rhetoric Fortune could be dealt with by equating her with Providence. A highly Boethian moment in the D ivine Com edy is that14 in which Dante and V irgil come upon a battle between spendthrifts and misers in hell, and V irgil explains that both parties are guilty of having contemned the opposite goods brought them by Fortune, a heavenly being who distributes the things of this world in w ays inaccessible to human knowledge and is herself, being blessed, inaccessible to human com­ plaints; and to complain against the ways of God is, we already know, to have begun losing il ben delFifitelletto, as the damned have lost it altogether.15 The Providence equated b y Boethius with Fate denoted G o d ’s timeless perception as it was to God himself; but it became more usual to speak of Providence as Dante here speaks of Fortune, indicat­ ing G o d ’s knowledge made apparent to us as foreknowledge, an intel­ lect which we must call inscrutable because it directed what we must know as a succession of particulars in time. This there was no w ay of 11 Ibid.,

h i , xii; iv, vi; v, iii-vi. 13 iv, vi. 15 Ibid., hi, 18.

12 iv, vii. 14 Inferno,

39

v ii ,

25-99.

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

knowing from within time; God knew it from the nunc-stans, but it was our business to believe that he knew it, as we could not until time should have an end. The spendthrifts and misers had failed in faith; what Dante here called Fortune could be and usually was termed Prov­ idence— Boethius’s Fortune seen with the eye of faith that knew her to be good. In a contrary sense, the Fortune of the pagans, the malig­ nant and irrational goddess of the wheel, denoted Providence as seen and experienced b y those whom faith had not made whole. But Boethius in the dialogue is in time, which is w h y he is subject to Fortune; and Philosophy affords him the intellectual certainty that the nunc-stans exists, not the capacity to share its vision. It follows that philosophy is not separate from faith, although Boethius does not develop the concept of a Christian faith in the sense of a personal devo­ tion to his Redeemer. Philosophy is not bringing him a share in the divine vision, but consolation and resignation to his fortune in the certainty that God ordains it to be good and knows it as he cannot know it; and faith is the appropriate name for this spiritual condition. Philosophy and faith, then, are to replace (or reconstitute) virtus as the response to jortuna; where a pagan and civic virtue found in Fortune the raw material for glorious deeds in w ar and statesmanship, and fame after death, the Boethian Christian regards it as a test, the occasion which demands and should evoke a life redeemed b y philosophic faith and freed from the bitterness of death. If he acts in the secular world, it will be to ensure that his is not “ a fugitive and cloistered virtue,” to give his faith greater perfection by exposing it to the trials of Fortune. Such, for centuries afterwards, was a proper meaning of the term “ Christian virtue,” although to Aquinas the virtutes were matters of moral practice and moral habit.16 It might seem that faith and the vita contemplativa had replaced poli­ tics and the vita activa at the core of the moral life, and there is of course a very great deal of truth in this; though it has to be kept in mind that contemplation is an activity,17 and the activity most appro­ priate to life in the civitas D ei, that city whose end is knowledge of and communion with God. But the relationships between pagan and Christian virtue, and between virtue and knowledge, are more com­ plex still. Applying an Aristotelian teleology to Roman ideas of virtus, it could be held that in acting upon his world through w ar and state­ craft, the practitioner of civic virtue was acting on himself; he was perform ing his proper business as a citizen and was making himself through action what Aristotle had said man was and should be by nature: a political animal. In this context the relation of virtus to for16 Summa, iz-2ae, question 55 (Blackfriars ed., vol. 23, 1969). 17 Aristotle, Politics, p. 289 (1325b). 40

PROVIDENCE, FORTUNE AND VIRTUE

tuna became as the relation of form to matter. Civic action, carried out by virtus— the quality of being a man (v ir)— seized upon the unshaped circumstance thrown up by fortune and shaped it, shaped Fortune her­ self, into the completed form of what human life should be: citizenship and the city it was lived in. Virtus might be thought of as the formative principle that shaped the end, or as the very end itself. The Augustinian Christian finds his end in the civitas Dei and in no earthly city— though the fact that unity with God is still thought of in the image of a civitas shows that it is still the political definition of man’s nature that has to be transcended— and the virtus by which he finds it is now the Boethian blend of philosophy and faith, through which he comes to be what by nature he is: a creature formed to know God and to glorify him forever. But Boethian philosophy is still opposed to fortuna, the darker side of societal life, and jortuna still assails men with circumstance which it is their proper business to shape into human life as it ought to be; their faith integrates suffering into the pattern of the redeemed life.18 A t the same time, the redemptive spirit consists as much in intellect— philosophy— as in belief; and the philosophy of the nunc-stans offers means of perceiving the phenomenal and temporal w orld— now equated with Fortune’s domain— in such a light that its transitory and time-bound particulars become intelligible through knowledge of the purposes, ends and universal entities for which they were formed. Men become what they ought to be through certainty of that G od who has shaped the world toward what it ought to be. It was when the civitas D ei became an eternal community of intellects that the political definition of man’s nature seemed finally to have been transcended. That time was not yet, and might not be till the end of time. W hile men inhabited time-bound bodies, philosophy could only convince them o f the existence of a divine vision, and faith must support them as long as they could not share it. But faith, in this definition, was reposed in the assurance of a timeless vision in which phenomenal things were perceived in the light of the ends to which they were formed; and at the same time faith helped shape men to their end, which was to share in this vision. Since man could achieve his true end only through redemption from the consequences of his Fall, this formatio must be thought of as a reform atio, a recovery of his true nature which had been lost b y Adam; an Aristotelian reformation is a recov­ ery of, or return to, form. But in the Augustinian tradition it was most sharply stated that man’s redemption was not possible through philoso­ phy alone, or even through a combination o f philosophy and faith; it could come about only through an act of G o d ’s grace, which philoso­ 18 De Consolatione, n, viii; iv, vii. 41

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

phy, faith, and virtuous practice might solicit but could never com­ mand, and might not even be thought of as meriting. The Aristotelian teleology had thus to be reconciled with the concept of grace— of those acts of G od ’s love which were in the strict sense gratuitous— and if man could recover his true form, which included the percep­ tion of things in the light of their true forms, only through grace, it was also necessary that the original creation of things in their natures, essences, or ends, by a God who was that of the Bible and not of Aristotle, be thought of as an act or acts of grace and gratuitous love. Grace thus appeared at the beginning and end of a circular motion of creation and redemption; it created things in their true natures and restored to their natures those creatures which had lapsed from them. Through a Christian virtus the individual did what he could to bring himself toward his reformatio by grace; but the effects of the Fall were such that there must be discontinuity between virtue and grace, even if one held with Aquinas that gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit. In redemption one would behold things “ face to face,” 10 in the true essences to which grace had shaped them, which one could not do even in the movement toward redemption— which, again, only grace had made possible. But if fortuna was the matter of history, then secular history was merely inert matter to be used in a process of reformatio^ it had no form, and in that sense no end, of its own. Boethius can be situated w holly within the Augustinian tradition; he regards the sequence of events in the sociopolitical world as a series of challenges to faith and philosophy, which the individual overcomes and integrates in the pat­ tern of his redeemed life as a citizen of the heavenly city. All fortune is good fortune only in the sense that every circumstance can be so used; there is meaning and pattern to it— what Boethius terms Fate— only in the sense that God can see the totality of history as the sum of individual redemptions. The sequence of events in the saeculum is not to be generalized into a sequence of redemptive meaning. Yet it remained doubtful how far the grand operation by which Augustine had divorced the redemptive process from the rise and fall of empires had been efficacious. The acts designed to bring about redemption had been performed by God in time, in an aevum hard to separate from that of the saeculum; they were dated by reference to the events of secular history— as in the creed it was daily recalled that Christ had “ suffered under Pontius Pilate” ; and in the incorrigibly political think­ ing of W estern men it was hard not to see some, perhaps mysterious, significance in such facts as that Daniel had prophesied to the rulers of Babylon, that the Apostle of Patmos at least seemed to be alluding 19 1 Corinthians: 13. 42

PROVIDENCE, FORTUNE AND VIRTUE

to earthly empires, and that the great institutions of Christian society appeared to have something to do with the conversion of the emperor Constantine. Augustine’s separation of history from eschatology had rested in the last analysis upon his denial that life in civil society had much to offer to the salvation of the soul. Once the possibility was entertained again that kingdoms and commonwealths, governed by Christians under Christian laws, might achieve a measure of earthly justice, practice of which, at a level sufficiently public to involve one’s membership in some kind of civitas terrena, might be positively related to one’s redemption through grace, the events of public history—the life of the civitas extended through time— must be seen as more than mere jortuna; or rather, a public jortuna must be shown as subject to the operations of grace. The revival of the Aristotelian doctrine that political association was natural to man therefore logically entailed the reunion of political history with eschatology. In the post-Augustinian world of Boethius political history had appeared as mere Fortune, convertible into Providence only through the eye of faith which knew that the individual’s fortunes might become the stuff of his redemption. H istory (to employ the modern term) had thus only a private meaning. But if the events of public history were to play any kind of redemptive role, the concept of providence must be expanded— as at any moment it could be— to include that of prophecy. The events of prophetic history were, like the creation and the ultimate redemption, the w ork of grace and gratui­ tous love; but here grace was seen, not in the creation or reformation of essential being, but in the performance of acts which, being unique and unrepeated, must be in time and, being in time, must be inaccessible to the philosophic intellect. That which performed them must be thought of as providence, since it performed purposive acts which constituted a series of occurrences in time and whose reasons were therefore beyond us; but in performing the acts of prophetic history, it at the same time revealed, by verbal or other means, some part of their significance to men. In accepting these divine messages to be true, men displayed faith of a somewhat different order from that we have so far been considering. Instead of intellectually affirming the existence of a divine intelligence whose perspectives could be described but not shared, faith now acknowledged that certain words or signs had been uttered, certain acts performed, at certain moments in time, and that these had been the acts of God, who had in them revealed certain truths to man. Because to acknowledge this was to make affirmations of his­ torical fact, it was not the w ork of the philosophic intellect; and when the messages of revelation consisted of statements of what had hap­ pened, as that God had been born a man, or promises of acts yet to 43

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

come, as that he would return at the end of time, they too exceeded the province of philosophy. (It is this dimension of belief that we miss in Boethius.) The faith reposed in prophecy could be thought of as acceptance of authority, and both the authoritative statements them­ selves and many of the messages which they uttered constituted points in time, in the sequence of prophetic history. And the authoritative utterances were public, not private; they had been made to societies of men— Israel, the church— and had helped to institutionalize them and give them a history. It was this which rendered them important in any attempt to revive political eschatology. Prophecy was the pub­ lic action of providence; it united the fortune which was converted into providence by faith with the fortune that was the historical dimen­ sion o f secular societies. In prophetic time one did not merely affirm the timelessness of the nunc-stans\ one affirmed the imminence of the eschaton. Hora novtssima, tempora pessima sunt; vigilemus. Prophetic history, then, served as a means of politicizing grace and re-sacralizing politics. The w ork of Augustine could be undone at any time that it was found possible to identify moments in the history of civil societies with moments in the eschatological scenario to be derived from the various prophetic books. There remained, of course, the diffi­ culty that prophecy did not, b y its nature, deal directly with the prob­ lem of the eschatological present; the scenario did not provide for everything which should happen between “ now” and the final escha­ ton, but took as its proper business the depiction of those scenes which should precede the end. And if one had resort to the complexities of typology and suggested that secular history— not to mention other realms of experience— would prefigure the apocalyptic occurrences at many times and in many places, one might find oneself back in a world of timeless archetypes and universals, in which secular history would return to the foot of the ladder of correspondences, as lacking any autonomous significance. If the life of civil society, lived forw ard in time as a succession of unrepeatable experiences, was to find its mean­ ing in the context of sacred history, it would have to be suggested that in the tract of civil history to be explained, prophecy itself was approaching its unique and unrepeatable end. Clearly, to claim that Florence or England and its history were on the point of becoming the theater of Christ’s return and G o d ’s final judgments was to expose oneself to charges of extreme hubris and blasphemy, as well as to make predictions peculiarly liable to falsification; but the claim was so fre­ quently made that it cannot be dismissed as a mere aberration. In these paragraphs we are concerned to construct a fram ework in which its recurrence m ay become intelligible. 44

PROVIDENCE, FORTUNE AND VIRTUE

Perhaps the best w av to explain the frequency of political apoca­ lyptic is to treat it as an index to the ideological tensions between church and secular society to be found in the later Christian centuries. The papal church rested upon the Augustinian divorce between escha­ tology and history; it denied redemptive significance to the structure and history of any secular society, while claiming itself to act and exercise authority as a bridge between civitas D ei and saeculum, a kind of institutionalization of the nunc-stans. So monolithic were these claims that any secular commonwealth or kingdom desiring to assert its autonomy was almost obliged to assert that it possessed redemptive significance and so that redemption was to be attained through its secular and historical operations. The church for its part was so heav­ ily committed to denial of the redemptive character of history that it was peculiarly vulnerable to revivals of the prophetic element in Chris­ tianity which asserted the historical character of redemption. Medieval heretics therefore almost invariably had recourse to apocalyptic, if with no other motive than to assert that redemption was to be found in the fulfillment of prophecy and not in the institutional operations of the timelessly based church; and in the prophetic languages they reactivated, secular rulers found the symbolism needed to give their operations redemptive significance. Princes and heretics were, within limits, natural allies; they shared a disposition to undermine the Augus­ tinian monolith by displacing the nunc-stans in favor of the eschaton, the civitas D ei in favor of Christ’s return to his saints at the end of history. Persons in both categories therefore made use of the two main streams of heterodox apocalyptic which ran through the later middle ages, meeting and mingling but remaining analytically distinguishable: the millenarian tradition which relied on the Book of Revelations to expect an overturning of all forms of w orldly rule and a reign upon earth of Christ and his saints, located within the end of historic time; and the tradition handed down from Joachim of Fiore through the Spiritual Franciscans, which declared that after an A ge of the Father in which G od had ruled through the covenant with Israel, and an Age of the Son in which Christ ruled through his mystical body the church, there would come an A ge of the Spirit in which G od would be mani­ fest in all men so chosen, as now he was incarnate in Christ alone.20 It is obvious that both these schemes had revolutionary potentialities, 20 Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (2d ed., N ew York: Harper and Row, 1961); Gordon Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester University Press, 2 vols., 1967); Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachism (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969). 45

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

in that they envisaged a rule by illuminated saints not bound by earlier laws and dispensations, whether secular or prophetic; and it happened from time to time that a prince found his heretical allies turning these weapons against his own authority. Nevertheless, the attractions of the prophetic scheme to any prince in conflict with the church were great, and subsequent history suggests that the princes and republics who embraced this ideology were wise in their generation. In the short view, religious individualists, anxious to exile the church from w orldly affairs and reconstitute it as a purely spiritual communion, were often glad to subject themselves w holly to the prince of this world in the belief that he could not touch their inner spirituality. In the long view, it is possible to trace the mutation of the expected millennium or Third A ge into that indefinite secular future which distinguishes the modern from the premodern sense of history.21 Apocalyptic, in fact, was a powerful instrument of secularization, a means of drawing the redemp­ tive process back into that dimension of social time from which Augus­ tine had sought to separate it, and of depicting it as the extension or the transformation of existing secular processes. This is w hy, in study­ ing the period with which this book is concerned, we shall have to bear in mind that political eschatology was a weapon to be employed on behalf of the ruling institutions of secular society as well as one for chiliastic insurgents against those rulers, and that the saint’s relation to society was never free from am biguity.22 There is a sense, then, in which apocalyptic helped to open the path toward modern secular historiography; but for the purposes of the present moment in the analysis, which is concerned with the poverty of the modes of historical explanation available in the political thought of late medieval man, what requires to be emphasized is that the main question raised b y the appeal to apocalyptic was whether secular politi­ cal experience was capable of an eschatological dimension, or whether it was not. If it was so capable, emergent crises in secular experience could be rendered intelligible b y identification with moments, persons 21 Ernest Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univer­ sity of California Press, 1949). 22 William M. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603-1660 (London: Macmillan, 1969), has been one of those pointing out that the merits of Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium should not permit us to think of millennialism as exclu­ sively an insurgent phenomenon; see also William Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963). Michael W alzer’s The Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965) is a classic study of the saint as alienated from both the ecclesiastical and the social orders; it has, however, become a commonplace of criticism that the two modes of alienation were not necessarily concurrent and that the saint’s involvement in secular society was greater and more productive of tensions than Walzer seemed to allow. See below, pp. 336-39

46

PROVIDENCE, FORTUNE AND VIRTUE

or symbols in one or other of the available eschatological scenarios; if not, not; and that was all the question at issue. W e have not yet reached a point which it can be imagined how apocalyptic might contribute, even indirectly, to the enlargement of the modes of explain­ ing the succession of one particular occurrence in secular politics, and so in secular history, to another. W e have simply added one more mode of dealing with the secular occurrence to those with which we were previously familiar. The emergency or occurrence we are imagining might be dealt with by the devices of experience and prudence, inte­ grated in usage and custom or responded to by means of statute or policy decision. It might be dealt with b y means of faith, integrated in the patterns of the redeemed Christian life of the believing individual who had suffered it as fortune and reconstituted it through the eye of faith as providence. The Christian believer might, somewhat intensify­ ing the activity of his political responses, enlarge his concept of provi­ dence to include prophecy, and deal with the emergency b y attribut­ ing to it an eschatological significance. Lastly— an alternative not much considered hitherto— he might, at the cost of considerable diminution in the vivacity of his faith, treat the emergency simply as the work of Fortune, either because he did not deserve or because he did not believe that Providence was at w ork on his behalf. The occurrence would then be without essential meaning, the sequence or time-dimension of such occurrences a mere spinning of the wheel. Fortune thus came to sym­ bolize the irrationality of history, the medieval sense of the absurd: history as it must seem to those who lacked faith, history as it must be if God and his providence did not exist. W hen medieval minds despaired, this symbolism appeared: the crystal spheres revolved per­ fectly in the heavens, but within the orbit of the moon the conse­ quences of the Fall caused the irrational circularities of Fortune to spin eccentrically23 and unchecked, and all history was summed up in the 23 On the title page of Robert Recorde’s The Castle of Knowledge (London, 1556; the first English work of Copernican astronomy), Knowledge appears pois­ ing the Sphere of Destiny on an upright staff, Ignorance driving the Wheel of Fortune by a rod attached to the center by a crank-handle. The following verses appear: Though spitefull Fortune turned her wheele 1 o staye the Sphere of Vranye, Yet dooth this Sphere resist that wheele, And fleeyth all fortunes villanye. Though earthe do honour Fortunes balle, And bytells blynde hyr wheele aduaunce, The heauens to fortune are not thralle, These Spheres surmount al fortunes chance. 47

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

figure of Hecuba lying beneath the wheel.24 Experience, prudence, and the arcana im perii; fortune + faith = providence; providence — faith = fortune; providence + prophecy = revealed eschatology; virtue and grace. These formulae constitute the model so far established of an intellectual equipment which lacked means of explicating the succession of particulars in social and political time, so that all responses to such particular occurrences must be found somewhat between the poles of experience and grace. W e proceed to test the model b y using it to explain the intellectual innovations which occurred when a conscious republicanism imposed, upon minds limited by such an equipment, the added burden of sustaining in time a politi­ cal structure intensely conscious of its own fragility and instability. H o w that challenge came to be imposed is the theme of the next chapter. The sphere’s accompanying symbol is the sun, the wheel’s the moon. The irreg­ ular patches on the moon’s face, no less than her after all regular waxing and waning, seem to have gained her the reputation of inconstancy and imperfection. The matter is discussed by Beatrice in Paradiso, 11, 49-148. For fortune symbolism in general see H. R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature (Cam­ bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927). 24Fortunae rota volvitur descendo minoratus alter in altum tollitur nimis exaltatus. Rex sedet in vertice caveat ruinam nam sub axe legimus Hecubam reginam.

Carmina Burana,

l x x v ii (ed. J. A. Schmeller, Breslau, 1904). (The images of Hecuba and the wheel recur in the Player King’s speech in Hamlet, 11, 2.) Cf. the other “Fortune” songs (1, l x x v , Lxxvia) and the drawing of the Wheel prefixed to the whole collection.

48

CHAPTER

III

T H E PROBLEM A N D ITS MODES c) The Vita Activa and the Vivere Civile

[i] that the ideal of the citizen implied a totally differ­ ent conceptualization of the modes of political knowledge and ac­ tion from that implicit in the scholastic-customary fram ework which we have so far studied. W ithin the limits of that fram ework, the indi­ vidual employed reason, which disclosed to him the eternal hierarchies of unchanging nature and enjoined him to maintain the cosmic order b y maintaining his place in that social and spiritual category to which his individual nature assigned him; he employed experience, which dis­ closed to him immemorial continuities of traditional behavior and could only counsel him to maintain them; and he employed a blend of prudence and faith on those occasions when the stream of contingent and particular events faced him with a problem so individual that nei­ ther reason nor syllogism, experience nor tradition, provided a ready­ made answer to it. O nly on these occasions, it might be contended, did he behave like a decision-making animal (and even then, not infre­ quently, more like an apocalyptically guided true believer); for the rest his behavior was that of the inhabitant of what some theorists call a traditional society. T o say so much would be to overargue the case; political processes often (some say always) go on within a received and inherited pattern of behavior, and the interpretation of tradition can be a complex and self-conscious political decision. Yet it remains true that a citizen, constantly involved with his fellows in the making of public decisions, must possess an intellectual arm ory which takes him beyond the perception of hierarchy and tradition, and gives him cause to rely on his and his fellow s’ power to understand and respond to what is happening to them. A customary community in one corner of an eternal order is not a republic o f citizens. If they believe in tradi­ tion as the only appropriate response to the challenge of contingent happenings, they w ill not apply their collective powers of positive deci­ sion; if they think of prudence as the response of a few decision-makers to the marginally unique problem, their bias will be toward the accept­ it c a n

be argued

49

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

ance of a monarchical gubernaculum ; if they think of a universal hier­ archy of being as the matrix of all values, they will not be thereby disposed to associate themselves in an independent sovereign body of decision-makers. The citizen must have a theory of knowledge which allows great latitude for public decisions upon public events. T o attempt the erection of a civic w ay of life upon epistemological foun­ dations which allow the recognition only of universal order and par­ ticular traditions is to be hampered by certain limitations. It can be argued that the history of Florentine political thought is the history of a striking but partial emancipation from these limitations. There is evidence that fourteenth-century minds visualized Floren­ tine citizenship in a context of universal order and authority, which could be both hierarchically and apocalyptically expressed. The civic patriotism of Dante (12 6 5 -13 2 1) was memorably intense, but he saw the delivery of Florence from faction rule as part of the restoration of Italy to political and spiritual health within a universal empire; and with that part of his mind which held the reformation of mankind to be accomplished by imperial rather than ecclesiastical authority, he envisaged the descent of an emperor from the Alps as both a temporal and a holy event, long prophesied in the context of apocalyptic time, which as we have seen was the time-context created by viewing redemption as a temporal process. There was an affinity between tem­ poral power and apocalyptic prophecy. Considering empire an instru­ ment of salvation, Dante placed Trajan and Justinian not far from Christ, and Brutus and Cassius with Judas in the very bottom of hell. The republic, being a mode of temporal authority, is viewed in the context of empire, and empire in the context of universal salvation apocalyptically conceived. Dante’s vision is, in a very high and com­ plex sense, both temporal and hierarchical, but to the extent that it is hierarchical it depicts human perfection, both personal and political, as to be found in occupying one’s due place in an eternal order; to the extent that it is apocalyptic, in playing one’s revealed or archetypal role in the historical processes of grace. In neither does the emphasis fall on joining with one’s fellow citizens to engage in collective secular decisions. The hierarchy is monarchical in form, being determined by authority descending from above, and because the hierarchy of the empire reflects that of the cosmos, it is the manifestation of principles which do not change. Dante’s patriotism was Ghibelline and imperialist; it gave his vision of time an apocalyptic but not a historicist dimension; he saw secular rule as the empire in which the eternal order was repeated and restored, not as the republic in which a particular group of men resolved what their particular destiny should be. 50

Vita Activa

and

Vivere Civile

In his Paradiso, Dante gave an exalted place to Joachim of Fiore,1 whose teachings, or traditions deriving from them, reappear in connec­ tion with that most extraordinary of the precursors of civic humanism, the Roman demagogue Cola di Rienzo (13 13 - 13 5 4 ). Cola was attempt­ ing, by dint of his own charismatic and indeed paranoiac personality, to unify the inhabitants of Rome into something like a commune, but found it necessary in pursuit of this aim to present the fourteenthcentury city as identical with the ancient Republic— and himself as its Tribune— and to declare unabated the direct authority of the Roman People over the pope as its elected bishop, the emperor as its elected prince and the whole world as its subject empire. Such claims asserted the republic b y im plying the continuity of universal empire, and it is not surprising to find that after his first fall from power, Cola spent some time with a community of Joachite hermits in the Abruzzi and emerged as a herald of the Third Age, summoning the emperor to take up his prophesied mission of reform ing the church and ruling the w orld.2 T o him as to Dante, republic, empire, and apocalypse were all of a piece; and though only a powerful charisma can account for Cola himself being taken seriously for long, the content of his claims, whether as Tribune of the Republic or as prophet of the Third Age, did not seem absurd to the best minds of his time. T he pioneer of humanism, Francesco Petrarca (130 4 -137 4 ), saw in Cola’s Republic a hopeful augury of the restitution of ancient virtue to Italy and the world, but at the same time saw no inconsistency in hoping that Cola would restore virtue by restoring the republic, hoping that the pope would restore it b y returning to Rome from Avignon and hoping that the emperor would restore it by descending from the Alps to set Italy in order. Petrarch, not a committed political man, did not radically distinguish between different forms of rule; it is also significant that in elaborating the image of virtue’s restoration, he set no great store b y apocalyptic prophecy.3 The techniques of humanist scholarship, as we shall see, were building up too human an image of ancient virtue, too social an image of the life of man in time, to leave much room for the types and symbols of the prophetic vocabulary. It may be signifi­ cant too that the people least impressed b y the Tribune’s rhodomontade seem to have been the Florentines; they felt no need to manufac­ ture a dramatic symbolism for the republic, or clothe it in prophetic 1 Paradiso, xn, 139-45. Reeves, Influence of Prophecy (ch. 2, n. 20, above). 2 Iris Origo, Tribune of Rome (London: Hogarth Press, 1938). 3 E. H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago University Press, 1961), ch. xn, pp. 63-73; PP120, 134-35. J. H. Whitfield, Petrarch and the Renascence (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), pp. 35-37.

51

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

declamation, because they had it already and could offer— especially in their more disenchanted moments— a singularly realistic account of its workings. Yet it was the Florentines, during the two centuries to come, w ho were to produce the most incisive articulations of the civic con­ sciousness and its problems; and though these expressions were to owe most to humanist ways of thinking and writing, the apocalyptic mode was far from having uttered its last word in their thoughts. In the early fifteenth century— to go no farther back— there can be traced in Florentine writings, notably those of Coluccio Salutati ( 1 3 3 1 14 0 6 ) and Leonardo Bruni ( 1 3 6 1 - 1 4 4 4 ) , what appears to be a decisive break with the w ay of thinking just outlined. The modern writers who have dealt most fully with this theme are Hans Baron and Eugenio G arin;4 but their w ork, while of great and deserved prestige, is still the subject of controversy among scholars and it is necessary to pick our w ay with caution. There does not seem to be much question that the follow ing changes in the Florentine ideological pattern can be seen taking place. There is, to begin with, a fairly rapid repudiation of a hitherto well-established foundation myth which had insisted that the city of Florence was originally a settlement of Julius Caesar’s soldiers, and the substitution of a myth which proclaimed the city a foundation of the Roman republic. In somewhat later work, Bruni is disposed to look even farther back, to consider Florence affiliated to the Etruscan city republics which had flourished before Roman domination of the peninsula, and to suggest that the absorption of these republics b y one republic had prepared the w ay for the latter’s absorption into a world tyranny (this, incidentally, was to anticipate a theme of Machiavelli’s). That the opposition of republican to Caesarian rule and the equation of the latter with tyranny rather than monarchy were no accidents is demonstrated by an attempt, found at the same time, to rescue the his­ torical figure of Brutus from the depths of infamy into which Dante had cast him.5 Dante had seen Brutus as a traitor against his superior, 4 Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 2d ed., 1966); Humanistic and Political Literature in Florence a?7d Venice at the Beginning of the Quattrocento (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955); From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni; Studies in Humanistic and Political Literature (Chicago University Press, 1968); “ Petrarch: His Inner Strug­ gles and the Humanistic Discovery of Man’s Nature,” in Rowe and Stockdale, eds., Florilegium Historiale: Essays Presented to Wallace K . Ferguson (Univer­ sity of Toronto Press, 1971). Eugenio Garin, Italian Humanism, Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance, trans. Peter Munz (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). George Holmes, The Florentine Enlightenment, 1400-1450 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969). 5 For denunciations of Caesar in Petrarch see Baron, in Florilegium Historiale (n. 4, above), pp. 19-20, 37-39.

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and since that superior prefigured the emperor, who reigned over the hierarchies of men as did God over the hierarchies of nature, had placed him and Cassius beside Judas who had betrayed God himself. But the subsequent revolution in historical imagery presented Brutus (Cassius has never been so responsive to idealization) as the type of republican citizen and tyrannicide, and condemned Caesar as tyrant and subverter of the republic.0 There is more to this than a mere revision of myths. The whole image of human authority and its history to which Florentines were supposed to look was being drastically reconstructed, deprived of its continuity and— in a most important sense— increasingly secularized. In what may be termed the imperialist vision of history, political society was envisaged as the existence among men of the hierarchical order existing in heaven and in nature; its legitimation and its organiz­ ing categories were alike timeless, and change could exist in it only as degeneration or recovery. Affiliation with the empire, then, like affilia­ tion with monarchy generally, was affiliation with the timeless. Those who sought, whether from a papalist point of view or one committed to political realism, to emphasize that empire or monarchy were of the civitas terrena, might indeed stress their secular character. But in the newer vision, the republic of Florence, stated as a high ideal but exist­ ing in the present and in its own past, was affiliated only with other republics and with those moments in past time at which republics had existed. T he republic was not timeless, because it did not reflect by simple correspondence the eternal order of nature; it was differently organized, and a mind which accepted republic and citizenship as prime realities might be committed to im plicitly separating the political from the natural order. The republic was more political than it was hierarchi­ cal; it was so organized as to assert its sovereignty and autonomy, and therefore its individuality and particularity. W hen the Florentine intel­ lect was prepared to accept loyalty to Florence as a concept separated from the natural order and its eternal values, we have one primary meaning o f the widespread Florentine saying about loving one’s coun­ try more than one’s own soul; there was an implied distinction and a conflict. But to assert the particularity of the republic to this extent was to assert that it existed in time, not eternity, and was therefore transitory and doomed to impermanence, for this was the condition of particular being. That the republican ideal accepted the fact of the republic’s mortality is symbolized b y the choice as hero of the unsuc­ cessful rebel Brutus. The one thing most clearly known about republics was that they came to an end in time, wThereas a theocentric universe 0Baron, Crisis (n. 4, above), ch. 3. 53

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perpetually affirmed monarchy, irrespective of the fate of particular monarchies. It was not even certain that the republic was the conse­ quence of a principle. T o affirm the republic, then, was to break up the timeless continuity of the hierarchic universe into particular moments: those periods of history at which republics had existed and which were w orthy of attention, and those at which they had not and which consequently afforded nothing of value or authority to the present. The idea of “ renaissance” after an age of barbarism would seem to owe something to a patriotic insistence on confronting the Florentine with the Roman republic and dismissing the intervening centuries of Roman and G er­ manic empire as an interlude of tyranny as well as barbarism. The particularity and historicity of the republic involved the particulariza­ tion of history and its secularization: involved, too, the repudiation of great part of it as devoid of value. It is interesting and important, how­ ever, that this raised a subsidiary problem in the evaluation of Floren­ tine history itself: that of the place to be assigned to Dante and other glories of Florentine letters, who had accepted the affiliation of repub­ lic to empire, denigrated Brutus and exalted Caesar, and done so in the vulgar tongue which rigorous humanists considered one symptom of medieval barbarism. The impulse to exalt the republic by declaring it the revival of antiquity could not pay the price of repudiating major elements of the republic’s own past, and Dante and the volgare were in due course rehabilitated. But this had to be done by providing explanations of how they could have existed, and done so gloriously, in a time of their own which was neither classical antiquity nor the classicizing present; and the image of the present itself was altered by the acknowledgment that it gloried in, and was descended from, the men of the trecento as well as those of antiquity.7 Thought was approaching the threshold of modern historical explanation, and the central discovery of the historical intellect that “ generations are equi­ distant from eternity” — that each of the phenomena of history existed in its own time, in its own right and in its own w ay. It was doing so in consequence of a movement of ideas which may be discerned at other moments in other cultures: when an image of past time as con­ tinuous and as bearing authority for the present is attacked, and seg­ ments of the past are dismissed as possessing no value— this may hap­ pen as a result of a classicizing attempt to locate all value in a particular period— it may follow either that the repudiated period reasserts its claim to authority over the present in consequence of some other rela7 Baron, Crisis, chs. 13-15. See also David Thompson and Alan F. Nagel (eds.), The Three Crowns of Florence: Humanist Assessments of Da?ite, Petr area and Boccaccio (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). 54

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tionship to it, or that it becomes necessary to explain how, if the phenomena concerned were without authority or value, they neverthe­ less existed and were causally linked with both present and past. In these circumstances some relativist mode of explaining the past, as having its own w ay of existing and its own values or other claims upon our attention, may very well arise.8 In the case we are studying, the continuity of the past exhibited many of the characteristics of a time­ less hierarchical order. It was attacked, and broken up into a sequence of moments possessing positive or negative value, because the existence of a particularized political form was imposed on it as a criterion of value; and a moment (the trecento), of negative value according to this scheme, proved to have positive value to the present because of the republic’s intense awareness of its own continuity and traditions. T w o images of time came into conflict, and the result was historical explanation of the trecento; but the whole organization of the timeless into time, and the conflicting evaluations of past time that followed, came about only in consequence of assertion of the republic’s individu­ ality and continuity. Hans Baron, supporting his thesis b y a detailed criticism of the chronology of certain key works of Florentine humanism, has argued that all this originated in a political crisis undergone b y the citizens about the year 1400. The powerful ruler Giangaleazzo Visconti, whose fam ily possessed a base of great power at Milan, seemed to be building up a system of hegemonies which might have resulted in the formation of a permanent monarchical state in north and central Italy. His power was spreading rapidly in Tuscany; a diplomatic and military separation had developed between Florence and Venice; and in this crisis, Baron argues, the Florentines felt themselves dramatically and traumatically isolated, while standing forth in their own eyes as the last champions of republican liberty in Italy and the known world. It is Baron’s thesis9 that in the two years preceding Giangaleazzo’s sudden death in late 1402 and the consequent collapse of his power, the revolution in his­ torical self-affiliation which we have been tracing came about in Florentine thought as part of a crisis in patriotism which was also a crisis in republican self-awareness. Isolated b y the Visconti power, the Florentines were intensely aware of themselves as a threatened com­ munity; isolated b y the grow ing territorial power of one man, they were aware of themselves as a structure based on republican institutions and values. The language of Milanese propagandists was Caesarian and 8 For an extended theoretical treatment, see my Politics, Language and Tim e, ch. 8 (“Time, Institutions and Action: An Essay on Traditions and Their Under­ standing” ). 9 Crisis, chs. 1-2, 10-11, 16. 55

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

imperial, and in reply the Florentine humanists, especially those con­ nected with the diplomatic chancellery of which Salutati and Bruni in turn were heads, took the revolutionary step of repudiating Caesarian symbolism and the imperial tradition altogether, identifying Florence with the republican principle, and polarizing the legitimating past into republican moments and interludes of darkness in the w ay that has been described. In association with this revolution in historiographical concepts, Baron finds evidence in writings of this time of a yet more profound crisis in Florentine thought. Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, the question had been intermittently discussed of the relative merits of a life spent in social activity— the vita activa— and a life spent in philo­ sophical pursuit of pure knowledge— the vita contemplativa. T o Athenians, convinced with one part of their minds that only the life of the citizen was truly ethical and human and with another that only the abstract world of unmotivated contemplation was truly intelligible and real, the problem of whether politics and philosophy were not antithetical had been a painful one. The medieval mind had, of course, loaded the debate in favor of contemplation; the philosopher’s con­ cerns, like those of the Christian, were not of this world, and even after the Aristotelian revival had rehabilitated belief in rational and social action, the knowledge by which universals were recognized was dis­ continuous with the prudence b y which they were applied in social decisions. The individual of Fortescue, obedient to natural law and cus­ tom and politically active only on the rare occasions when statutes were to be made, could scarcely imagine his civic life as in serious rivalry with his philosophic contemplation, if he engaged in the latter at all; and Petrarch had felt able to reproach his ideal Roman, Cicero, with getting himself entangled in disreputable politics and put to an unw orthy death when he should have been attending to his proper business as a philosopher.10 But in later Florentine thinking there is a great deal said in favor of a vita activa which is specifically a vivere civile— a w ay of life given over to civic concerns and the (ultimately political) activity of citizenship; and it is plainly possible to correlate a w riter’s preferred w ay of life with his allegiance to a political form. T he practitioner of the vita contemplativa might elect to contemplate the unchanging hierarchies of being and to find his place in an eternal order under a monarch who played in microcosm G o d ’s role as guar­ antor of that order; but the exponent of a vivere civile was committed to participation and action in a social structure which made such con10 There is an extensive literature on Petrarch’s changing attitudes; see Baron, in Florilegium Historiale, and From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni (n. 4, above), chs. 1 and 2. 56

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duct by the individual possible— to citizenship, therefore, in some species of polis, so that at a later date vivere civile became a technical term for a broadly based civic constitution. Baron not only finds such a contrast of attitudes implicit and manifest in the writings of Milanese and Florentine publicists during the crisis of 1 399-1402; he also aims at explaining by reference to the same series of events what appears to be fluctuating behavior by Florentines with regard to the same polari­ zation of values. Coluccio Salutati, in particular, wavered most remark­ ably between asserting the values of active citizenship and asserting those of contemplation, withdrawal from the world and acquiescence in monarchical or even tyrannical rule. B y a most detailed examination of the texts of Salutati and other writers, Baron endeavors to relate them to the progress of the Viscontian crisis in such a w ay as to show that a decisive shift in favor of active and participant values occurred during this crucial period.11 The rediscovery of citizenship, like the revaluation of history, was produced by a sudden intensification of republican self-awareness in the traumatic confrontation with Giangaleazzo. Baron’s thesis has for some years been exposed to the criticisms of scholars, and it may be observed that its most challenged, and challeng­ ing, elements are those which concern chronology and motivation, by asserting that a decisive shift in values can be dated to a single period and described as the result of that period’s dominant experiences. It is natural that historical criticism has tended to be focused on these asser­ tions; historians are interested in questions of cause and motive, and historians of ideas in the relations between ideas and events, thought and experience, and it is right and proper that they should wish to know whether a major ideological change came about at the moment and for the reasons that Baron says it did. It is also right to remind ourselves that to know the occasion of an intellectual happening is not to know everything about what it was that happened. The present study has been so designed that we are concerned with identifying certain conceptual vocabularies which were available for talking about political systems considered in their particularity, with exploring their limitations and implications and considering how these operated, and with examining the processes by which these conceptual systems, their uses and implications, changed over time. It is therefore not of exclu­ sive importance to us to know whether or not certain changes in Florentine thought came about as part and as result of the events of 1399-1402; we wish no less ardently to know what these conceptual changes were, what further changes they implied and what came about 11 Baron, Crisis, chs. 5 and 7; From Petrarch to Bruni, chs. 3 and 4; “Leonardo Bruni,” Past and Prese?it 36 (1967). 57

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in the world of thought as the consequence of their having occurred. So in the case of a major linguistic breakthrough or revolution in con­ cepts— such as a revaluation of history in association with increased stress on values of civic participation— it is important to know what happened in terms of the implications and consequences of changes in men’s conceptual vocabularies, as well as in terms of the occasions and causes of these changes’ first occurring. The term “ civic humanism” has become inseparably attached to Baron’s thesis, and scholars who wish to challenge the latter are dis­ posed to challenge also either the utility of the term or the importance of the phenomena it denotes. In addition to attacks upon Baron’s chro­ nology, it is argued, first, that humanists’ concern with the vita activa did not significantly arise from their crise de conscience as republican citizens; second, that the citizen of the Italian commune did not need the language of the humanists in order to articulate his civic conscious­ ness. Since in the remainder of this book it is proposed to use the term “ civic humanism” to denote a certain formulation of republican con­ sciousness and its problems, we have reached a suitable point at which to indicate what will be implicitly claimed whenever the phrase is used, and to what historical postulates its use may commit the writer and the reader. This can conveniently be done by placing alongside Baron’s certain other interpretations of the character of humanist politi­ cal consciousness. Jerrold Seigel has argued12 that the origins of the humanists’ con­ cern with the vita activa lie in their professional and intellectual com­ mitments rather than their civic sensibilities. He points out that human­ ists were b y their social function affiliated with the art of rhetoric, an intellectual pursuit fully as important in Italian culture as philoso­ phy and always seen in the sharpest contrast with it. Philosophy was concerned with the knowledge of universals and the understanding of particulars in their light, and the attitude appropriate in the presence of universals was one of contemplation, not action; philosophy there­ fore was nonpolitical and a universe seen as composed of universals was inhabited only secondarily by political animals. Rhetoric, on the other hand, was concerned with persuading men to act, to decide, to approve; it was intellect in action and in society, presupposing always the presence of other men to whom the intellect was addressing itself. 12 Jerrold E. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: the Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla (Princeton University Press, 1968); “Civic Humanism or Ciceronian Rhetoric?” Past and Present 34 (1966), to which Baron’s “Leonardo Bruni” is a reply. And see David Robey, “P. P. Vergerio the Elder: Republicanism and Civic Values in the W ork of an Early Humanist,” Past a?id Present 58 ( 1 9 7 3 ), pp. 3 -3 7 . 58

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Political by its nature, it was invariably and necessarily immersed in particular situations, particular decisions, and particular relationships; and being immersed in the particular world, must always face the ques­ tion whether, once compared with philosophy, it brought knowledge of anything. It is to be observed, however, that rhetoric, occupying a place in Italian thought comparable with that occupied by experience in the thought of Fortescue, is in virtue of its political character far more positive and active; it is forward-looking and persuades men to do things, whereas experience results only in discovery of what they have already done. A world where rhetoric ranks equal with philoso­ phy is a world of face-to-face political decisions; a world where experi­ ence and custom occupy its place is one of institutionalized traditions. Seigel contends that humanist thought in this respect stems from the confrontation between philosophy, whose values were contemplative, and rhetoric, whose values were civic and active: that the achievement of Petrarch was to persuade his admirers and successors to accept this confrontation as a dialectic between rival value systems, neither of which could be given absolute priority over the other; and that it became the characteristic of humanist thought to move back and forth between the civic and contemplative positions, in a w ay which was inherent in the humanist heritage and need not be directly related to the history of external events. Consequently, he says, Baron both under­ estimates the extent to which Bruni, as well as Salutati and no less than Petrarch, was prepared to take up the contemplative option, and mis­ understands the w ay in which option for one or other set of values should be explained. T o opt for civic values did not mean to commit oneself w holly to republicanism as a political cause, and to opt for contemplative values did not mean to express total disillusionment with the republic. The humanist was ambivalent as between action and con­ templation; it was his metier as an intellectual to be so, and he could practice it perfectly well within the fram ework of the republic. Con­ sequently, humanism as a whole did not become “ civic” when the republic triumphed, or “ contemplative” when it fell on evil days, and the individual’s movement between the two preferences need not be explained in terms of his responses to political events. Baron’s emphasis on explanation b y chronology may therefore be misplaced. N o w all this m ay very well be; but clearly it does not mean that there was no such thing as civic humanism. Since rhetoric was both civic and active, it was possible for the rhetorician— or the humanist qua rhetorician— to provide a language in which to articulate a civic consciousness he might or might not share. The rhetorician and the citizen were alike committed to viewing human life in terms of par­ ticipation in particular actions and decisions, in particular political rela­ 59

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tionships between particular men; and we have found in one develop­ ment of the style of civic humanism a means of expressing this view of life by reconstructing history as the story of republics existing in time. That the affinity ran far deeper than that, and that the whole bias of humanism, whether civic or not, was toward viewing life in terms of particular actions at particular times, is suggested by the study of the humanist spirit to be found in the works of Eugenio G arin.18 The humanist scholar, he contends, regarded philology rather than philosophy as the path to knowledge, and in a case like that of Lorenzo Valla, this came about because he was a rhetorician; regarding truth as uttered rather than perceived, he became interested in the moments and occasions on which— the contexts in which— the speech-acts embodying it had been performed.14 The scholastic philosopher con­ fronted with a text of Aristotle engaged in a complex process of abstrac­ tion, analysis, and arrangement, in which the text and its context and author might virtually disappear and the all-important step might be the statement of universal principles whose consequences could then be perceived. The humanist’s criticism of this procedure— a criticism vehement and often unjust— was that the actual thought of Aristotle, the actual wisdom of Aristotle, was being destroyed and replaced by schematizations, and he set himself to learn what he could from Aris­ totle himself, from his mind as revealed in his words, from his words as preserved in the document. In point of fact, Aristotle is a poor exam­ ple; so far was he considered the originator of the scholastic process now under attack that he was denounced and replaced b y other authors, and it was some time before humanists, having completed their denun­ ciation of Aristotelianism, returned to the study of Aristotle. But the effect of the humanist technique was to exalt philology, the attempt to find out what the documents actually contained, what the words actually meant, what the philosopher, orator, historian, or poet had 13 Above, n. 4. 14 Garin, pp. 5-7, 15-17, 50-66, 69-77. F ° r Valla and the role of rhetoric see also Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy, ch. v; Donald R. Kelley, The Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law and History in the French Renais­ sance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), chs. 1 and 11; the present writer’s review essay in History and Theory 11, no. 1 (1972), 89-97; N ancy S. Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 1970). Discussion of civic humanism from a social-political point of view may be found in Lauro Martines, The Social World of the Florentme Humanists, 1390-1460 (Princeton University Press, 1963) and Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence (Princeton University Press, 1968), Marvin B. Becker, Florence in Transitio?2 (2 vols., Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967-68), and others (see the handbook edited by Anthony Molho, Social a?jd Economic Foundations of the Italian Renaissance, New York: John W iley and Sons, 1969). 60

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actually said.15 In place of logic it tended to exalt “ grammar,” which like “ philology” itself was a compendious term for the study of past languages, textual criticism, the structure of sentences, and in general the written word as an instrument for conveying meaning. Through grammar and philology, and in a sense only through them, the author’s meaning might be known; the auxiliary sciences of language permitted his mind to communicate direct with his reader’s. But the epistemological and, ultimately, the philosophical conse­ quences were drastic. The more it was stressed that an author long dead was speaking to us in the present, and the less we made of any structure of timeless universals through which his voice was mediated, the more conscious we must be of communication across time and of the time-space separating him from us; and the more carefully we facilitated this communication by studying the text and the context in which he had spoken or written, the more conscious we must become of the temporal, social, and historical circumstances in which he had expressed his thought and which, in shaping the language and the con­ tent of it, had shaped the thought itself. This intensified historical aware­ ness is clearly stated in the letters which Petrarch addressed to Cicero and L iv y , speaking direct from his moment in time to them in theirs— from such and such a year “ of the Incarnation of Him of whom you would have heard had you lived a little longer.” 10 W e may find some­ thing similar in the speech of Dante to V irgil— “ poet, b y the God you did not know, lead on” 17— but Petrarch does not follow Dante in accompanying V irgil on an extra-historical journey through the regions where individual lives become eternal. Poetry (a close relative of prophecy) is concerned with the universal and the divine, but prose— especially the prose of the historian or the orator— is social and secular. The philological consciousness is very much a consciousness of the mind as expressed, and the world as seen, in prose; the humanist rhetori­ cians were converting the intellectual life into a conversation between men in time. A certain affinity between philological and political humanism is beginning to appear. Both isolated certain moments in the human past 15 In the final stage this endeavor was extended to the words of God himself. See George Newton Conklin, Biblical Criticism and Heresy in Milton (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1949), pp. 1-2, and the dictum of Valla (quoted by Garin, p. 16) that “ none of the words of Christ have come to us, for Christ spoke in Hebrew and never wrote down anything.” 16 This is the dating of the letter to Livy, Fain., xxiv, 8, but nearly all his letters to classical authors—at least to philosophers and historians, but not to poets—employ similar language. See Mario E. Cosenza, trans., Petrarch's Letters to Classical Authors (Chicago University Press, 1910). 17 Inferno, 1, 130. 61

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and endeavored to establish communication between these and moments in the present. Petrarch learned direct from L iv y and wrote direct to him; Salutati’s and Bruni’s Florence learned direct from republican Rome and envisaged itself as Rom e’s revival. Later in the story, Machia­ velli’s famous letter to Francesco Vettori describes how he comes home in the evening, puts on formal clothing, and enters into the presence and conversation of the ancients by reading their books.18 The con­ versation is meant to restore Machiavelli not only to the understand­ ing of politics, but indirectly to actual civic participation. The idea of direct conversation with antiquity is a key concept in all forms of humanism and may occur in or out of a political context, but there is something ineradicably social and even political about it: the implica­ tion that the heights of human experience, under God, are to be found in a meeting of like minds and in their communication and joint con­ ception of propositions, sentiments, and decisions. The conversation with the ancients which results in knowledge is affiliated with the con­ versation among citizens which results in decision and law. Both take place between particular men, located at particular moments in time— ancient and humanist occupy different moments, the citizens are all at the same point together— and employing the language, while experi­ encing the problems, appropriate to their several moments (the human­ ist must be a grammarian, the citizens must speak a common volgare). If man as intellectual animal is defined as “ humanist,” while man as political animal is defined as “ citizen,” both acts of knowledge and acts of decision assume some of the character of what Fortescue called “ statutes” ; they are agreed upon by living men, located in time and employing the intellectual resources possessed b y beings so located. But such intellectual acts, which occupy a tertiary place in Fortescue, are fixed by both humanists and citizens at the very center of the pic­ ture and call for intellectual powers considerably greater than the sim­ ple prudence which was the only means of performing them known to Fortescue. The humanist stress on communication was enough to raise the question of how particular men, existing at particular moments, could lay claim to secure knowledge. The answer could not be given in terms of the simple cognition of universals, or the intellectual animal would be thrust back into the universe of the scholastics, the political animal into that of the imperial hierarchies; to give it in terms of the simple accumulation of experience would be similarly fatal to humanist 18 “ . . . entro nelle antique corti degli antiqui huomini, dove, da loro ricevuto amorevolmente, mi pasco di quel cibo, che solum e mio, et che io nacqui per lui; dove io non mi vergogno parlare con loro, et domandarli della ragione delle loro actioni; et quelli per loro humanita mi rispondono . . . Machiavelli, Lettere, ed. F. Gaeta (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961), p. 304. 62

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and citizen alike. Yet an answer must be given somehow, or Petrarch would be unable to read L ivy, Florence unable to govern itself. H ow might a conversation between particulars be capable of organized rationality? The rhetoric of philology, or of politics, might provide the answer; but politics was more than rhetoric. Humanist attitudes toward the problem of universals were various and exceedingly complex, and by no means the same at Florence as they were, for example, at Padua; but it seems clear that the main lines of thought which emerged were those which neither reverted to straightforward scholastic realism nor adopted the relativistic position that only particulars could be known. Humanist philosophy certainly did not dispense with the idea that there were universal objects of knowledge, awareness of which provided the only true certainty or rationality; but, committed by its adoption of philology to the view that these could be known only through the works of particular men in particular times and places, it sought— often in a rew orking of Platonic themes— justification for thinking of universals as somehow immanent in the words and deeds of men, to be known through creative knowl­ edge of and engagement in these. The Renaissance was at its most Platonic19 in exalting the living relationship of the soul with the univer­ sal paradigm or value above the intellect’s abstract contemplation of it; history could be praised above philosophy on the grounds that the lat­ ter inspired the intellect with the idea of truth, but the former the whole spirit with concrete examples of it. Truth itself became less a system of propositions than a system of relationships to which the inquiring spirit became party by its inquiry. In consequence, participa­ tion in the humanist conversation, in one or other of its forms, became in itself the mode of relation to the universal, and the universal could be known and experienced by perpetual engagement in the conversa­ tion with particulars. The question was what form the conversation should take, what manner of conversation most fully realized the universal. T o Aristotle it had been a problem whether the highest life for the individual was one of politics and action or one of knowledge and contemplation; and if Florentine humanism acquired from its civic environment a bias toward the political, it absorbed a contrary bias from the mainstream of philosophic tradition. If the universal were thought of primarily as an object of intellectual knowledge, then the preferred form of conversation would be contemplative, a philosophi­ cal dialogue with one’s contemporaries and the great dead. It is signifi­ cant, however, that contemplation has itself become social, a matter of dialogue and mind-to-mind relationships rather than of formal deduc­ 19 Garin, pp. 9-11, and chs. 111 and iv. 63

THE PROBLEM AND ITS MODES

tion and demonstration, and that the term “ politia” (in Greek politeia, which to Aristotle had denoted the structure of relationships compos­ ing the city) is sometimes employed, as we might speak of the “ repub­ lic of letters,” to describe the community of minds, living and dead, in which it went on. The Athenian polis had been a community of culture as well as of decision-making, and words like “ polite,” “ civil,” “ urbane” seem to have acquired from the contemplative style of humanism the connotation, which they bear in contrast to their cognate terms “ political,” “ civic,” “ urban,” of a social life which consists in civilized conversation rather than in political decision and action.20 Such a contemplative style there was, and it not infrequently appears under the rule of a benevolent prince and patron who could be seen as a philosopher-king— at Milan, in Medicean Florence, at Rome or Urbino. The alternative style took citizenship as its ideal; it therefore flourished in a republican climate and preeminently at Florence, for the atmosphere of Venice, while it encouraged learning in an environ­ ment of relative liberty, was too heavily senatorial for passionate asseverations of an ideal of active citizenship. The full reality, however, is m arkedly more complex than these words would suggest. It can be seen that the ideal of the vivere civile, in competition— if competition there was— with the contemplative ideal, was possessed of great strengths and great weaknesses. In the first place it is now apparent that whether as philologist, rhetorician, or republican citizen, the humanist had a profound commitment to participation in human life in concrete and particular detail, whether the emphasis lay on letters and language or on politics and persuasion. The need to make the par­ ticular intelligible had given rise to the idea of conversation, the idea that the universal was immanent in participati >n in the web of life and language, and so the highest values, even those of nonpolitical contem­ plation, had come to be seen as attainable only through conversation and social association. But it must follow that association was itself a high and necessary good, a prerequisite for attaining the universal, and the entire Athenian and Aristotelian tradition was emphatic that the highest form of human association was political, the community of distribution, decision, and action which Aristotle had seen in the polis. There were therefore the strongest reasons leading the humanist who had identified knowledge with social activity toward identifying him­ self with the citizen— Seigel is at bottom arguing that civic values were inherent in the humanist’s social position rather than his response to external events. It could be held besides that if knowledge was to be found in con­ versation, it was a kind of activity. The philosophic basis of the vivere 20 Garin, pp. 38, 87, 158-62. 64

Vita Activa

and

Vivere Civile

civile was the conception that it was in action, in the production of works and deeds of all kinds, that the life of man rose to the stature of those universal values which were immanent in it. T he active man asserted with the total engagement of his personality what the con­ templative man could only know, through the inward eye of his intel­ lect or the dialectics of Platonic conversation and friendship; Garin sees in civic humanism anticipations of V ic o ’s doctrine that we know7 the world through creating it in history.21 But if action was to assert the universal, it must be shown that some form of action possessed univer­ sality. Here is the peculiar importance of those disputes over the relative primacy of law and medicine, to be found in the writings of Petrarch, Salutati, and others during the fifteenth century.22 Medicine was on the whole a practical rather than a contemplative art. It could of course claim to be concerned with the universal laws of the natural world, and in a hierarchical society where politics were held to reflect nature could claim to have much to teach the statesman by w av of analogy; but in the humanist environment it was made to fight on other ground and was accused, first of a merely mechanical concern with securing individual results in individual cases, and second o f being limited to a knowledge of the world of particulars that never rose above it to the knowledge of laws. Plato had accused it of being empirical but never philosophical, and it was in the spirit of the R epublic that Salutati made personified Medicine confess with lamentations that it was confined to the merely traditional knowledge which came with the simple accu­ mulation of experience.28 B y contrast, the statesman or jurist was con­ cerned with the universal and with that which did not change. M orality was inherent in man and human laws the result of his knowledge of his own nature. Since the political community was the necessary set­ ting for such self-knowledge and the laws that were its issue, the con­ duct of the affairs of such a community was Plato’s architectonic art, the conduct o f human activity at the point where it attained universal­ ity and itself the highest form of that activity that could be conceived. Salutati was continuing the Athenian tradition of declaring that the political community was self-sufficient and consequently universal; and he presented the activity of ruling such a community not as the lonely rationality of a specialized ruler or monarch, but as a perpetual conversation between citizens engaged in, yet rising above, a multitude of social activities. Here was the active conversation in which human life attained universality in the conduct of particulars. Yet Salutati was capable of proclaiming the superiority of contem21 Garin, p. 55. 22 Seigel, pp. 37-40; Garin, pp. 24, 31-36. Garin, pp. 32-33.

The Medici were able to draw these distinctions the better because they already possessed pre­ eminent power; this gave them the experience with which to judge men and the security in which to exercise their judgment.30 There are two causes of error in judgment of this kind: ignorance and jealousy (:malignita). Ignorance, which is preeminently the fault of popular assemblies, is the more dangerous of the two in its effects because by its nature it is without limits, whereas jealousy ceases with the removal of the individual who is its object.37 Guicciardini is allowing Bernardo to beg the question. Soderini had defined Medicean rule as a tyranny, and had very clearly stated the classic view that the jealousy of the tyrant is without limits, since he regards everything not subject to his power as a threat to it, and fears especially the virtu— the innate moral quality— of every other individ­ ual. In defense of malignita, Bernardo says that men are b y nature inclined to the good and that anvone who preferred evil to good would be rather a beast than a man.38 It was of course the classic contention that the tyrant was precisely such a beast, but Bernardo is here exploit­ ing the assumption— to which Soderini has been made to assent— that Medicean rule was a tyranny of a peculiar kind, mansueto rather than fiero, operating b y manipulating men’s good qualities rather than by seeking to destroy them. But a “ moderate tyranny” is almost a contra­ diction in terms, and Bernardo’s rhetoric is tending to empty the term “ tyranny” of much of its meaning. The Medici subjected the good in men to their wills b y using it; but in order to use it they must have known it and been able to evaluate it, and to go on using it they must have been able to refrain from destroying it. Reason in them cannot have been overthrown b y fear and appetite to the extent to which it was in the typical tyrant; and the weakness of human nature, by which its natural love of the good is so easily overthrown, cannot have been inherently more pronounced in them than in any other class of rulers. 35 Above, n. 30. 36 D. e D., pp. 44-46. 37 D. e D ., pp. 46, 55. 38 D. e D., p. 55: “Quanto alia malignita, io vi dico che per natura tutti gli uomini sono inclinati al bene, ne e nessuno a chi risulti interesse pari dal male come dal bene, che per natura non gli piaccia piu el bene; e se pure si ne truova qualcuno, che sono rarissimi, meritano essere chiamati piu presto bestie che uomini, poi che mancono di quella inclinazione che e naturale quasi a tutti gli uomini.”

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This leads Bernardo, at the end of his argument in Book I, to deny that Medicean rule was doomed by its nature to degeneration and cor­ ruption. It operated by utilizing the qualities of the ottimati and had therefore to leave them intact; and this necessity acted as a fren o, a bridle or limitation, on any tendency of the ruling w ill to run to excess. Furthermore, the ottimati could not be of service to the Medici unless they acted as autonomous beings, that is to say freely; and Medicean rule, though it was a tyranny in the sense that everything was done in accordance with their will, was never conducted like uno stato di uno principe assoluto, in which the sovereignty of the ruling will is institutionalized and visible. The appearances and the image (le dimostrazioni e la immagine) were always those of free government.39 T o take aw ay the image would have been to take aw ay the life and the soul of the city; because this was not done (and only a madman would have done it) the Medici ruled a city stronger for the circumstance that it was governed by a mixture of love and force, rather than by naked violence.40 Love, after all, is a self-moved activity; the weight of the words used b y Guicciardini tells against the view that he wished to represent Florentines as governed by illusion. There must have been something real about a liberty, the need to respect which was a real limitation on Medicean power. But in defending the Medici against the charge of tyranny, Guicciardini has in fact represented their gov­ ernment as something to be distinguished from a principato assoluto— 39 D. e D., p. 77: “Lo stato de’ Medici, ancora che, come io ho detto, fussi una tirannide e che loro fussino interamente padroni, perche ogni cosa si faceva secondo la loro volunta, nondimanco non era venuto su come uno stato di uno principe assoluto, ma accompagnato co’ modi della liberta e della civilita, perche ogni cosa si governava sotto nome di republica e col mezzo de’ magistrati, e’ quali se bene disponevano quanto gli era ordinato, pure le dimostrazioni e la immagine era che el governo fussi libero; e come si cercava di satisfare alia molti tudine de’ cittadini con la distribuzione degli uflici, cosi bisognava satisfacessino a’ principali dello stato non solo con le dignita principali, ma ancora col fare maneggiare a loro le cose importanti, e pero di tutto si facevano consulte publiche e private.” 40 D. e D., pp. 77-78: “E pero nessuno de’ Medici, se non fussi publico pazzo, arebbe mai fatto questo, perche potevano conservare la autorita sua, sanza fare uno passo che gli avessi a inimicare ognuno, e bisognava che, facendolo, pensassino o uscire di Firenze a ogni piccola occasione che venissi, o aversi a ridurre tutti in su le arme ed in su la forza; cosa che e’ tiranni non debbono mai fare, se non per necessita, di volere fondarsi tutti in su la violenzia, quando hanno modo di mantenersi col mescolare lo amore e la forza. Aggiugnesi che chi togliessi alia nostra la sua civilita ed immagine di liberta, e riducessila a forma di principato, gli torebbe la anima sua, la vita sua e la indebolirebbe e conquasserebbe al possibile; e quanto e piu debole e manco vale la citta, tanto viene a essere piu debole e manco valere che ne e padrone; e cosi se e’ Medici avessino preso el principato assoluto, arebbono diminiuto e non cresciuto la sua potenzia e riputazione.” 236

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that is to say, though he does not use the term, a mixed monarchy. W e are approaching the doctrine of French and English kingship when we learn that Medicean power was limited b y the obligation to consult and respect the chief men and magistrates of the city— not to share power with them in any formal sense. This obligation is not very unlike that to respect the forms of republican government, which kept Medi­ cean rule a monarchy in disguise. Bernardo’s argument, however, is still directed toward recommend­ ing the Medicean system to the ottimati, and is consequently as much aristocratic as monarchic in character. It departs furthest from the Aristotelian or Polybian doctrine of the coordination of distinct pow ­ ers in its thrust toward the view that a man or group of men in supreme authority are fitted and enabled b y that supremacy to per­ form all the functions of power, and do not need the support of any coordinate intelligence; but it falls short of a theory of sovereignty in its refusal to locate supreme power in either one or a few . It is note­ w orthy that Bernardo’s discussion of the role of the ottimati under Medicean rule is perfectly compatible with the assumption that their supreme value is virtu, whereas there is another aspect of his argument which rests entirely on the concept of prudence and in which the dis­ tinction between m onarchy and aristocracy is far less pronounced. This is the section in which he assails the participation of the Consiglio Grande in decisions on external policy ( cose di fuora).41 Here the train of thought carries us directly back to concepts of the particular event, of intelligence, number, and time, such as we have repeatedly seen to be basic to this aspect of Renaissance thinking. Affairs of external policy, we are told, have no regularity or certain course, but vary every day with the happenings of the world, so that our thinking about them must be largely a matter of conjecture. The smallest cause can have the greatest effect, and identical causes have effects of the greatest diversity. “ So it is necessary that the governors of states should be men of prudence, vigilantly attentive to the smallest accident, and weighing every possible consequence in order to obviate at the beginning, and eliminate as far as possible, the power of chance and fortune.” 42 4 1D. e D., pp. 60-65. 42 D. e D., pp. 60-61: “Perche le cose di questa sorte non hanno regola certa ne corso determinato, anzi hanno ogni di variazione secondo gli andamenti del mondo, e le deliberazioni che se ne hanno a fare, si hanno quasi sempre a fondare in su le conietture, e da uno piccolo moto dependono el piu delle volte importanze di grandissime cose, e da’ principi che a pena paiano considerabili nascono spesso effetti ponderosissimi. Pero e necessario che chi governa gli stati sia bene prudente, vigili attentissimamente ogni minimo accidente, e pesato bene tutto quello che ne

2 37

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There could be no clearer statement of Guicciardini’s refusal to enter into that world of virtu that so fascinated Machiavelli. Virtu as audacity, the dynamic and perhaps creative power of a prince or a people in arms, sought to dominate fortune rather than eliminate it; Machiavelli found this characteristic in the innovator of genius and in the equation of citizen and warrior. But Guicciardini is identifying (if not replacing) virtu with prudence, the steersman’s or doctor’s power to observe events and accommodate oneself to them, rather than seeking to shape or determine them; his is a politics of maneuver rather than of action. It calls for the maximum degree of information and deliberation compatible with the unrelenting and unpredictable speed o f events, and the case against popular control of external policy is that the many cannot achieve this. One man or a few, Bernardo says, have the time and the application to acquire this intuitive sense for affairs and to translate it into action. An assembly of many men has not;43 but it is not quite clear whether the reasons for this are quantitative or qualitative. On the one hand it is indicated that a problem, knowledge of which has to be diffused among many men, is unlikely to be studied and inwardly digested, and that decisions which require the concur­ rence of many minds will be too slow in the making or the alteration. On the other hand there is language which suggests that an assembly of many will be an assembly of individuals each intent on his private affairs, and consequently lacking the leisure in which experience, pru­ dence, and an understanding o f power politics can alone be acquired; Bernardo even suggests that the many are especially corruptible because, as private individuals, they do not regard the common good as their own, whereas a single ruler thinks of the common good as his own property.44 A t all events, an assembly cannot develop the delib­ possi succedere, si ingegni sopra tutto di ovviare a’ principi ed escludere quanto si puo la potesta del caso e della fortuna.” 43 D. e D ., p. 61: “ Questo e proprio di uno governo dove la autorita e in uno solo o in pochi, perche hanno el tempo, hanno la diligenzia, hanno la mente volta tutta a questi pensiere, e quando cognoscono el bisogno, hanno faculta di provedere secondo la natura delle cose; che tutto e alieno da uno governo di moltitudine, perche e’ molti non pensono, non attendono, non veggono e non cognoscono se non quando le cose sono ridotte in luogo che sono manifeste a ognuno, ed allora quello che da principio si sarebbe proveduto sicuramente e con poco fatica e spesa, non si puo poi ricorreggere se non con grandissime difficulta e pericoli, e con spese intollerabili.” 44 D. e D., p. 65: “Dove hanno a deliberare molti e el pericolo della corruttela, perche essendo uomini private e che non hanno el caso commune per suo proprio, possono essere corrotti dalle promesse e doni de’ principi . . . questi non si ha a temere da uno, perche essendo padrone di quello stato, non si lascera mai comperare per dare via o per disordinare quello che reputa suo.”

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erative and intuitive knowledge which an understanding of power politics requires, and so can never attain continuity of policy; but the powers with whom they must conduct their relations will for the most part be governed by princes, who do have durable conceptions of their own interests and so can understand and w ork with one another, but who will consequently refuse to enter upon relations with democracies that do not know their own minds.45 For the same reason, princes can usually deal with m ercenary cap­ tains and soldiers, but these are the natural enemies of popular govern­ ments. A prince regards war as a normal activity and his relations with mercenaries are durable; but a dem ocracy makes war only when it must, employs mercenaries only as an emergency measure and tries to get rid of them, if possible unpaid, as soon as the emergency is over.46 It is useless, adds Bernardo, to allege the success of the Romans in conducting war and foreign policy under a popular government, since it is possible to deny that their military success was related to their governmental structure. Since the latter was full of discord and con­ fusion, it cannot have contributed to their virtu in war, which was in any case as great under the kings as under liberta. The Roman mili­ tary system was not the consequence of popular government, but con­ tributed two things to its success. In the first place, it enabled the Romans to rely w holly on their own power and so to do without that vigilanzia e diligenzia sottile necessary to those who must rely on diplomacy amid the power of others. In the second, it placed control of war and policy in the hands of the consuls, experienced military men who looked on w ar as the source of their civic greatness and even as a profession (bottega). W e cannot imitate the Romans unless we can duplicate the conditions of their civic life.47 45 D. e D., pp. 63-64: “ . . . Queste coniunzione continuate si fanno difficilmente con uno popolo, perche non essendo sempre e’ medesimi uomini che governono, e pero potendosi variare e’ pareri ed e’ fini secondo la diversita delle persone, uno principe che non vede potere fare fondamento fermo con questi modi di governo, ne sa con chi si avere a intendere o stabilire, non vi pone speranza ne si ristrigne teco, disegnando che ne’ bisogni o nelle occasioni tue tu ti vaglia si poco di lui come lui spera potersi valere di te.” 46 D. e D ., p. 65: “Sanza che, molto manco si possono confidare de’ capitani e de’ soldati, che possa fare uno solo, perche tra’ soldati mercennari ed e’ populi e una inimicizia quasi naturale: questi se ne servono nella guerra, perche non pos­ sono fare altro; fatta la pace non gli remuneranno, anzi gli scacciano e gli perseguitano, pure che possino farlo; quegli altri, cognoscendo non servire a nessuno, o pensano tenere la guerra lunga per cavare piu lungamente profitto dalla sua necessita, o voltono lo animo a gratificarsi col principe suo inimico; o almeno gli servono freddamente . . .” 47 D. e D., p. 68: “N e mi allegate in contrario lo esemplo de’ romani, che benche avessino el governo libero e largo, acquistano tanto imperio; perche . . . a me non

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W hether or not Guicciardini was aware of the content o f Machia­ velli’s Discorsi or of the debates in the Orti Oricellari, his argument can only be read as forming an antithesis to what Machiavelli had to say. It is to be observed that he takes for granted the impossibility of duplicating Roman conditions, that is, of making military training and discipline part of the civic personality of every Florentine citizen. In Book ii Bernardo is made to deplore the decline of the civic militia, but to argue that it is now too late to bring it back;48 he does not, how ­ ever, argue that it would be bad to restore it on the grounds that this would mean conceding too much power to the people. Guicciardini m erely assumes that Florence cannot exert dominant military strength, but must exist by diplomatic subtlety in a world of princes and condottieri; and he remarks at a later point that if the Romans had employed mercenaries and so had had to live “ as unarmed cities do,” b y means o f w it rather than arms, their form of government would have ruined them in a very few years.49 Intelligence of this order is possible only to one or a few , and the form of government in a citta disarmata must conform to that. But once again, Guicciardini is not singing the praises of the ottimati so much as telling them to change their values. In set­ ting up a constitution in which the Consiglio Grande has such power, they were relying on virtii in Soderini’s sense; that the military and diplomatic condition of the city forbids their relying on virtii in M achiavelli’s philo-Roman sense is one more reason w h y the quality required of them should be seen as prudence. Bernardo remarks that the architects of the 1494 constitution meant well, but could not know how their experiments would turn out: pare che el modo del governo di Roma fussi di qualita da fondare tanta grandezza; perche era composto in modo da partorire molte discordi e tumulti, tanto che se non avessi supplito la virtu delle arme, che fu tra loro vivissima ed ordinatissima, credo certo che non arebbono fatto progresso grande. . . . e dove si fa el fonda­ mento in sulle arme proprie, massime eccellenti ed efficaci come erano le loro, si puo intermettere quella vigilanzia e diligenzia sottile che e necessaria a chi si regge in su le pratiche ed aggiramenti. Ne avevano allora e’ capi della citta a durare fatica a persuadere al popolo . . . perche erano uomini militari, e che non sapevano vivere sanza guerra, che era la bottega donde cavavano ricchezze, onori e riputazione. Pero non si puo regolare secondo questi esempli chi non ha le cose con le condizione e qualita che avevano loro.” 48 D. e D., pp. 90-93. 49 D. e D., p. 155: “Se avessino guerreggiato con le arme mercennarie ed in consequenzia avuto a valersi come fanno le citta disarmate, della sollecitudine, della diligenzia, del vegghiare minutamente le cose, della industria e delle giran­ dole, non dubbitate che vivendo drento come facevano, pochi anni la arebbono rovinata.” 2 40

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nor is this any wonder, since none of them had seen the city free or managed the humours of free men; and those who have studied lib­ erty in books have not observed and digested its peculiarities as have those who know it b y experience, which teaches us many things that learning and innate intelligence never impart.50 T h ey should also have considered that the city of Florence is already old, and that such cities are very hard to reform or to prevent from reverting to their former harmful usages.51 Guicciardini does not men­ tion here the reform ing legislator whom Machiavelli had depicted as having so inhumanly hard a task in the like circumstances; there was little point in doing so where his main concern was to enjoin prudence and caution upon the ottimati, and this is a moment at which Bernardo adjures his hearers to fling aw ay ambition and be content with what is possible. T h e y might have done better not to overthrow the Medici, but having done so they must learn to live with the consequences. But if we read Book i simply as recommending the abandonment of virtii in favor of prudence or of the civic ideal in favor of the quasimonarchical authority of a ruling group, w e shall be little prepared for what is to follow in Book n. Here Bernardo is invited to state his conception of the best form of government attainable for Florence in post-1494 circumstances; and he does so in terms of a complex dis­ tribution of authority between a gonfaloniere, a senate, and a Consiglio Grande, in which Venice is consciously copied as the best example ever to have existed o f a constitution uniting the three forms of gov­ ernment. The tone is classical and humanist throughout. Bernardo dis­ plays an erudition in ancient and modern history hard to reconcile with his earlier disclaimers o f learning; he mentions with respect— though, significantly, he does not feel able to adopt— the ideal of a civic militia; and, most perplexing of all, he accepts as a postulate that one of the criteria for judging any form of government is its success at encourag­ ing virtu in a sense fundamentally indistinguishable from Soderini’s. A drastic shift in perspective would seem to have occurred. T o V ittorio De Caprariis, one of the most penetrating of G uicciar­ dini’s modern analysts, it seemed inescapable that Book n was point­ less, an unprofitable excursion into the realms of the ideal and (like 50 D. e D., p. 81: “ Chi ha ordinato queste cose ha avuto buoni fini, ma non ha avertito particularmente a tutto quello che bisognava; ne me ne maraviglio, perche non vive nessuno che abbi mai veduto la citta libera, ne che abbi maneggiato gli umori della liberta, e chi gli ha imparati in su’ libri non ha osservato tutti e’ par­ ticulari e gustatigli, come che gli cognosce per esperienzia, la quale in fatto aggiugne a molte cose dove la scienzia ed el giudicio naturale solo non arriva.” 51 Above, ch. v, n. io. 2 41

RO M E AND V E N IC E

the R icordi) of no use or value to the student of his thought’s real development.52 But De Caprariis was a brilliant expositor of the tradi­ tion of Crocean historicism; he was exclusively concerned to study Guicciardini’s transition dalla politica alia storia, from devising stable constitutional schemes for Florence to the realization, expressed in the great history of his later years, that the civic lives of Florentines and all other Italians now existed in a current of profound historical change which was hardly any longer of their own making. De Caprariis was Crocean enough to feel that human self-knowledge was essentially his­ torical knowledge, and awaited only the rise of intellects strong enough to realize that man’s life was led in history and nowhere else; and he experienced an evident impatience when Guicciardini seemed to turn aside after advancing so rapidly on the road to that discovery. It was also— and rightly— an essential part of his argument that Guicciardini’s realization that the ottimati now existed solely in their history was based upon the realization that their fortunes had become irretrievably bound to those of the Medici; and therefore he had stressed those pas­ sages of Book i which depict the Medici and the ottimati as jointly exercising a supreme and self-moderating power, interpreting them as constituting a wholesale abandonment of the Aristotelian-Polybian tra­ dition. This left him unable to accept the revival of that tradition and o f the ottim ati\ position within it, which forms the theme of Book n. He accordingly accused the second half of the Dialogo del R eggimento di Firenze of the deadly sin of unhistoric “ abstractness” (astrattezza) and denied it any significance whatever. But such thinking is itself unhistorical. Men like Guicciardini are not so naive as to engage at length in merely conventional writing unless the convention itself has some high degree of significance for them; and the problem is to find out what it was. A t about the time when Guicciardini was writing the D ialogo, Machiavelli composed the Discorso delle cose fiorentine dopo la morte di Lorenzo, in which he genuinely seemed to believe that the ecclesiastics now heading the Medici fam ily— Pope Leo X and the future Pope Clement V II— not being themselves permitted to found hereditary princedoms, might be content with a constitutional settlement at Florence in which the fam­ ily was secured by a kind of hereditary lien on the role of the One in a government very much of the Venetian pattern. It is conventional to ascribe to Machiavelli a streak of idealism which Guicciardini lacked, and we may agree with De Caprariis53 that though Guicciardini would have happily enough seen the Medici exercise the effective power in his imaginary constitution, he did not expect to see them 52 De Caprariis, pp. 78-82.

53 Ibid., p. 71. 24 2

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institute it. Since 1512 it had been his belief that though the Medici needed the ottimati to legitimate and stabilize their rule, the objective necessities o f power did not render them dependent on optimate sup­ port, but rather the reverse. There was a moral necessity, but political necessity did not support it. Consequently we may see Guicciardini, writing the Dialogo in 1520 and 1521, as facing the dilemma which Joseph Levenson has described as that between “ value” and “ history” ;54 what ought to be is not what is going to happen, but nonetheless it requires to be affirmed. In these circumstances, to affirm one’s values is not an act o f unreal abstraction, but precisely a moral necessity. If the ottimati and the city were not going to get what their natures required them to enjoy, the only w ay to evaluate what they were going to get was to study in depth what they ought to have had. There is room within this dichotomy for that duality of values which G u ic­ ciardini always sensed when he thought about his own order. In the world as it was after 1 5 1 2 — or after 1494— the pursuit of ambizione, onore, and virtu might be most dangerous and inappropriate behavior for the ottimati to display; but in the world as their own values and nature required that it should be, virtu in this sense must be given freedom to develop. It was therefore permissible to describe a vivere in many w ays founded on aristocratic virtu, as a means to evaluating— and therefore to understanding— a world in which the aristocratic strategy must be prudence. W e shall see that the last-named concept is never out of reach all through Book 11, and that a return to the his­ torical world is made toward its conclusion. The w ay to interpret the remainder of the D ialogo, then, is to observe how the dialogue between virtu and prudence gives rise to what were to become key ideas in the tradition of republican constitu­ tionalism: a generalization which will support the thesis that many of the roots of that tradition were in Aristotelian politics considered as a “ science of virtue.” As with Machiavelli’s Discorsi, we are in a concep­ tual world related to, but not dependent on, such formalized theories of mixed government as the Polybian cyclical scheme, and one of the main differences which distinguish the two Florentines from their ancient masters is the special emphasis which the former give to the related themes o f arms and civic virtue. Book 11 o f Guicciardini’s w ork opens with a reexamination of the concept o f virtu, and an early point raised b y the interlocutors is the possibility of reviving at Florence the tradition of a citizen militia. Capponi contends that a popular govern­ ment will do better than Bernardo has suggested at maintaining the 54 Joseph R. Levenson, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the M ind of Modern China (Berke­ ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953 and 1959), introduction.

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city’s power over surrounding territories, because it will attract to this end the active enthusiasm of more citizens than will a governo stretto, especially should the citizenry be rearmed.55 Bernardo— somewhat sur­ prisingly if we are to hear in his voice the immediate tones of Francesco Guicciardini— agrees without much sign of skepticism, though it is characteristic of him that he does not use the argument that personal military service heightens the individual’s personal virtu, and that his two reasons for thinking a citizen arm y beneficial to popular govern­ ment are first, that it enables such a city to defeat its enemies despite the internal disorders to which it will be prone, and second, that the potenzia e virtu resulting will do much to nullify the weaknesses of popular government, because an armed state has less need of the vigilanzia and industria which only the few can provide.56 The association between an armed people and virtu can never quite be eliminated and Bernardo thinks that the abandonment of the civic militia, if it did not originate in popular persecution of the nobility— a class of military leaders— was the w ork of faction leaders who felt their power safer when the people were disarmed and too much engrossed in business to care for risking their persons.57 Harm ful as the results have been, he does not see much hope of restoring the militia; to alter the habits and values of the people would take many years of good government, dur­ ing which (a glance at 1 512) the risks of relying on an im perfectly restored militia would be too great.58 In the world as it is, the city is disarmed and requires the rule of prudent men; in a world dominated by theoretical values, a civic milizia might be the basis o f civic virtu. But though Guicciardini will allow that a citizen arm y may make popular government strong and success55 D. e D., pp. 89-90. 56 D. e D., p. 90: “ Che lo essere armati di arme vostre fussi non solo utile ed el modo di conservarvi, ma ancora el cammino di pervenire a grandezza eccessiva, e cosa tanto manifesta che non accade provarla, e ve lo mostrano gli esempli delle antiche republiche e della vostra ancora, che mentre che fu armata, benche piena di parte e di mille disordini, dette sempre delle busse a’ nostri vicini e getto e’ fondamenti del dominio che noi abbiamo, mantenendosi secondo e’ tempi e condizione di allora, in sicurta e riputazione grandissima. E la potenzia e virtu che vi darebbono le arme vostre quando fussino bene ordinate, non solo sarebbe contrapeso pari a’ disordini che io temo che abbi a recare questa larghezza, ma di gran lunga gli avanzerebbe, perche chi ha le arme in mano non e necessitato reggersi tanto in su la vigilanzia ed in su la industria delle pratiche.” 57 D. e D., pp. 90-91: “La cagione di questa mutazione bisogna che nascessi o dalla oppressione che fece el popolo a’ nobili, e’ quali avevano grado e riputazione assai nella milizia, o pure ordinariamente dagli altri che tennono per e’ tempi lo stato, parendo loro poterlo meglio tenere se la citta era disarmata, o da comminciare el popolo a darsi troppo alle mercatantie ed alle arte e piacere piu e’ guadagni per e’ quali non si mittava in pericolo la persona.” 58 D. e D., p. 92.

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ful, he will not accept the thesis that the strongest and most successful form of government is a popular one because it generates a citizen army. Bernardo repeats at this stage his earlier contention that Roman military discipline owed nothing to the popular form of government; it was established b y the kings and m erely continued b y the republic, and in those days every city in Italy armed its people.59 It is hard to think of the argument he is seeking to repudiate without expressing it in the terms of Machiavelli’s Discorsi, and this impression is heightened when the problem of Rome is reexamined at the end of Book n. In a lengthy discussion,60 which seems to take place after the main business of the dialogue is concluded, Piero Guicciardini is made to take up the question of the connections between disorder in the early republic and the arming of the people. Since the Romans had buona milizia, he says, they must have had buoni ordini; since they had grandissima virtu, they must have had buona educazione and hence buone leggi. The struggles between the orders looked more alarming than they were and brought no fundamental disorder.61 The senate, being greatly outnum­ bered b y the people, could either leave them unarmed at the price of m ilitary weakness or make enough concessions to their umori to ensure their military and political support.62 N o doubt it would have been 59 Ibid. 60 D. e D., pp. 148-58. 61 D. e D., p. 148: . . ponendo quello fondamento che nessuno nega ne puo negare, che la milizia sua fussi buona, bisogna confessare che la citta avessi buoni ordini, altrimenti non sarebbe stato possibile che avessi buona disciplina militare. Dimostrasi ancora perche non solo nella milizia ma in tutte le altre cose laudabili ebbe quella citta infiniti esempli di grandissima virtu, e’ quali non sarebbono stati se la educazione non vi fussi stata buona, ne la educazione puo essere buona dove le leggi non sono buone e bene osservate, e dove sia questo, non si puo dire che l’ordine del governo sia cattivo. Dunche ne seguita che quegli tumulti tra e’ padri e la plebe, tra e’ consuli ed e’ tribuni, erano piu spaventosi in dimostrazione che in effetti, e quella confusione che nasceva non disordinava le cose sustanziali della republica.” Compare Machiavelli, Discorsi, 1, 4 (Opere, p. 102): “N e si puo chiamare in alcun modo con ragione una republica inordinata, dove sieno tanti esempli di virtu, perche li buoni esempli nascano dalla buona educazione, la buona educa­ zione dalle buone leggi, e le buone leggi da quelli tumulti che mold inconsideramente dannano; perche chi esaminera bene il fine d’essi, non troverra ch’egli abbiano partorito alcuno esilio o violenza in disfavore del commune bene, ma leggi e ordini in beneficio della publica liberta.” 62 D. e D., pp. 148-49: “ Di poi essendo el numero del senato piccolo, quello del popolo grandissimo, bisogna che e’ romani si disponessino o a non servire del popolo nelle guerre, il che arebbe tolto loro la occasione di fare quello grande imperio, o volendo potere maneggiarlo, gli comportassino qualche cosa e lasciassingli sfogare gli umori suoi, che non tendevono a altro che a difendersi dalla oppressione de’ piu potenti ed a guardare la liberta commune.” Cf. Machiavelli, loc. cit.: “ . . . le quali cose tutte spaventano non che altro chi legge; dico come ogni citta debbe avere i suoi modi con i quali il popolo possa

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better to have the people armed but not tumultuous, but nothing in the social world is so perfect that it lacks some accompanying evil.63 Dis­ order at Rome therefore arose more from the nature of things than from any specific defect in the constitution, and the tribunate, a series of devices intended to protect the people against the senate, contained this disorder so effectively that Bernardo might well have included something o f the kind in his ideal constitution.64 It is very difficult to believe that Guicciardini was unacquainted with Machiavelli’s Discorsi when he completed the Dialogo; but the argu­ ments which he puts in the mouth of his father, and has Bernardo refute, are essentially those of Machiavelli whether he knew this or not. It is important to grasp clearly just what he aimed to refute: first, that the struggle between the orders was the necessary consequence of arming the people; second, that the tribunate was the means of con­ taining this struggle; third, that Roman military prowess forms an argu­ ment in favor of the popular element in government. Bernardo’s first contention is that the turbulence of the plebeians was not the simple consequence of the assertiveness of men in arms, but arose from specific defects in the social order. The patricians formed a distinctive heredi­ tary class who monopolized all honors and offices and form ally excluded plebeians from these; and they treated the latter with arro­ gance and oppressiveness, especially in matters of debt. Under the kings all these conditions obtained, and the people were enrolled in the arm y; yet there were no overt conflicts. The reason is that the kings used their supreme magistracy to protect the plebeians against the aristoc­ racy, and promoted significant numbers of plebeians into the senatorial sfogare l’ambizione sua, e massime quelle citta che nelle cose importanti si vogliono valere del popolo. . . . E i desiderii d’ popoli liberi rade volte sono perniziosi alia liberta, perche e’ nascono o da essere oppressi, o da suspizione di avere ad essere oppressi.” 63 D. e D., pp. 148-49: “N e negano che se si fussi potuto trovare uno mezzo che sanza avere el popolo tumultuoso si fussino potuti valere di lui alia guerra, sarebbe stato meglio; ma perche nelle cose umane e impossibile che una cosa sia el tutto buona sanza portare seco qualche mali, e da chiamare buono tutto quello che sanza comparazione ha in se piu bene che male.” Cf. Machiavelli, Discorsi, 1, 6 (Opere, pp. 107-8): “Ed in tutte le cose umane si vede questo, chi le esaminera bene, che non si puo mai cancellare uno inconveniente, che non ne surga un altro. Pertanto se tu vuoi fare uno popolo numeroso ed armato, per poter fare un grande imperio, la fai di qualita che tu non lo puoi maneggiare a tuo modo; se tu lo mantieni o piccolo o disarmato per poter maneggiarlo, se tu acquisti dominio, non lo puoi tenere, o ei diventa si vile che tu sei preda di qualunque ti assalta, e pero in ogni nostra deliberazione si debbe considerare dove sono meno inconvenienti, e pigliare quello per migliore partito, perche tutto netto, tutto sanza sospetto non si truova mai.” 64 D. e D., pp. 148-49. 246

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order; but when they were overthrown the leading plebeians saw all magistracies closed to them by their class enemies and the plebe bassa saw their only protector taken away. Conflict occurred as the latter supported the form er in their struggle to force themselves into office. The city was still young, however, and fortune favorable inasmuch as the evils in this state of affairs were observed in time for their cure to become apparent; the patricians steadily if reluctantly gave w ay— it was again fortunate that they were so few — and opened more and more magistracies to plebeian leaders, and in proportion as this happened the plebe bassa showed themselves content that others should enjoy magistracy so long as they were protected in their lives and goods. In proportion also, the tribunate ceased to be a significant office; and the conclusion to be drawn is that the whole struggle, including the neces­ sity for tribunes, could have been avoided from the beginning if magis­ tracies had been awarded without distinction between patricians and plebeians. There was no causal relation between the arming of the peo­ ple and the existence of enmities between the orders.65 As for Roman military virtu, this is not to be taken as proving that the ordini and leggi under which it flourished were good because the cause of it. T h e causes of Roman military success, says Bernardo, were costumi— love o f glory, love of the patria; and he explains these by reference to historical rather than institutional causes. T h e city was poor and surrounded b y enemies; when these were defeated and incor­ porated in an empire which brought wealth and luxury with it, cor­ ruption ensued and inordinate vices flourished under the best of laws.66 65 D. e D., pp. 150-53. That Guicciardini, while contravening the interpretations of the Discorsi, is operating within a very similar conceptual scheme, is shown by the following passage (p. 153): “E certo se voi leggete le antiche istorie, io non credo che voi troviate mai o rarissime volte che una citta in una ordinazione medesima sia stata ordinata perfettamente; ma ha avuto qualche principio non perfetto, e nel processo del tempo si e scoperto quando uno disordine quando un altro, che si e avuto a correggere. Pero si puo dire con verita che a ordinare una bella republica non basta mai la prudenzia degli uomini, ma bisogna sia accompagnata dalla buona fortuna di quella citta, la quale consiste che e’ disordini che scuopre la giornata ed esperienzia si scuoprino in tempo ed in modo e con tale occasione che si corregghino.” 66 D. e D., p. 157: “N e io ho biasimato el governo romano in tutti gli ordini suoi anzi oltre al laudare la disciplina militare, laudo e’ costumi loro che furono ammirabili e santi, lo appetito che ebbono della vera gloria, e lo amore ardentissimo della patria, e molte virtu che furono in quella citta piu che mai in alcuna altra. Le quali cose non si disordinorono per la mala disposizione del governo nelle parti dette di sopra, perche le sedizioni non vennono a quegli estremi che disordinano tutti e’ beni delle citta, ed el vivere di quella eta non era corrotto come sono stati e’ tempi sequenti massime sendo la citta povera e circundata di inimici che non gli lasciava scorrere alle delizie ed a’ piaceri; in modo che io credo che non tanto le legge buone, quanto la natura degli uomini e la severita

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It is clear that Guicciardini felt that military virtu and a civic militia might exist without a popular government and brought more to the latter than they derived from it. But he does not go to the length of arguing that a civic militia should be avoided because it necessitates the follies of popular government; indeed, his argument is form ally incompatible with this position. He is against popular government at Florence because the city cannot be armed; he argues, not that it should not be armed on normative grounds, but that it cannot be armed on historical grounds. This must sooner or later carry us back into the realm of prudence. But the debate about virtu is far from being at its end. Guicciardini’s critique of the patrician order indicates that his aristocratic preferences were compatible with a firm rejection of any legally or institutionally stretto class monopolizing office. He was not (in his writings at least) an oligarch and had no interest whatever in an order of nobility; his elitist model of government is at every point in the analysis a competitive meritocracy, in which those possessing virtu— whatever role social position may play in affording the oppor­ tunity to develop it— acquire and maintain political ascendancy b y pub­ licly displaying that quality, which can only be acquired and displayed in civic and political action.67 The only other role for the Florentine ottimati was that of collaborators with the Medici, and even this state of affairs was one in which the Medici replaced the popolo as judges of the display of virtu, more than it was one in which the nature of virtu was fundamentally modified. If virtu was not ascriptive, but had to be acquired, displayed and recognized, there must be a certain open­ ness about the political system founded upon it. As we probe the nature of virtu, moreover, it becomes clear that such a political system places magnificence among its central values. Follow ing the discussion of the militia early in Book n, Soderini is di quegli antichi tempi . . . producessino quelle virtu e quelli costumi tanto notabili e la conservassino lungamente sincera da ogni corruzione di vizi. Vedete che ne’ tempi sequenti la citta fu sempre meglio ordinata di legge ed era unita e concorde, e pure gli uomini andorono imbastardendo, e quelle virtu eccellente si convertirono in vizi enormi, e’ quali non nascono dalle discordie della citta, ma dalle ricchezze, dalle grandezze degli imperi e dalle sicurta.” 67 D. e D., p. 93: “ [Soderini:] E quegli ingegni piu elevati che sentono piu che gli altri el gusto della vera gloria ed onore, aranno occasione e liberta di dimostrare ed esercitare piu le sue virtu. Di che io tengo conto non per satisfare o fomentare la ambizione loro, ma per beneficio della citta, la quale . . . si troverra che sempre si regge in su la virtu di pochi, perche pochi sono capaci di impresa si alta, che sono quegli che la natura ha dotati di piu ingegno e giudicio che gli altri. . . . la gloria ed onore vero . . . consiste totalmente in fare opere generose e laudabili in beneficio ed esaltazione della sua patria ed utilita degli altri cittadini, non perdonando ne a fatica ne a pericolo.” 248

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allowed to restate the case for virtu as he sees it. In reply to Bernardo’s earlier arguments, he maintains that it is not a sufficient definition of liberta that each man is able to enjoy his own under law, without owing it to any pow erful protector or fearing any powerful oppressor. This is essentially a private ideal, he says, and is not conducive enough to a sense of the res publica. Soderini is arguing for a government of liberta and virtu, that is to say one in which the unusually talented few are allowed to satisfy their thirst for onore, which can be attained only by the performance in public of outstanding deeds beneficial to the patria and the public good; his liberty is that of the elite to develop their virtu to the full; and it is in this statement of his case that w e realize how far virtu and onore have become identified. It is necessary, he goes on, to consider honor, magnificence and majesty and to rate generosita and amplitudine above utilitd alone. It may be that cities were founded to conserve the security and convenience ( commodita) of individuals, but for the very reason that these are private ends, cities cannot endure unless their citizens and rulers aim to make them mag­ nificent and illustrious and to acquire for themselves the reputation among other peoples of being generosi, ingegnosi, virtuosi e prudenti (the last two epithets especially catch the reader’s eye). In private men we admire humility, frugality and modesty, but in public affairs the desirable qualities are generosity, magnificence and splendor.68 N ot only is onore the end o f liberta; it is shame and dishonor that are par­ ticularly to be dreaded in losing it, especially in the case of a city which is publicly committed to liberty ed ha fatta questa professione. This is plainly an extreme case of that honor-centered scheme of values which many would consider characteristic o f “ Renaissance man.” It should not be forgotten, however, that even here onore is a form of civic virtu\ it is attained in serving the common good, and in pursuing it and its concomitant values above all others, we are pro­ 68 D. e D., pp. 94-95: . . al bene essere di una citta si abbi a considerare non solo che la sia governata giustamente e sanza oppressione di persona ed in modo che gli uomini godino el suo con sicurta, ma ancora che la abbia uno governo tale che gli dia dignita e splendore: perche el pensare solo alio utile ed a godersi sicuramente el suo, e piu presto cosa privata che conveniente a uno publico, nel quale si debbe . . . considerare piu quella generosita ed amplitudine che la utilita. Perche se bene le citta furono instituite principalmente per sicurta . . . la com­ modita che ricerca la vita umana, nondimeno si appartiene pensare . . . in modo che gli abitatori acquistino . . . riputazione e fama di essere generosi, ingegnosi, virtuosi e prudenti; perche el fine solo della sicurta e delle commodita e con­ veniente a’ privati considerandogli a uno per uno, ma piu basso e piu abietto assai di quello che debbe essere alia nobilita di una congregazione. . . . Pero dicono gli scrittori che ne’ privati si lauda la umilita, la parsimonia, la modestia, ma nella cose publiche si considera la generosita, la magnificenzia e lo splendore.” 2 49

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claiming the supremacy of the common good. W hat is noteworthy is that republican and patriotic values are being expressed in the form of ego-serving ideals like honor, reputation, and generosity, rather than in the distributive, social, and far more traditional ideal of justice. It is also observable that Soderini thinks of the supremacy of liberta, onore, and virtu rather as historically conditioned and determined by human choice than as natural to political man from the beginning. Referring to Bernardo’s contention that in evaluating any form of government one should examine the effects it produces and not whether liberta is one of its formal components, he observes that this m ay be true when a city is being established for the first time, but that when a city is committed to liberty to the point where it can be said that freedom has become part of its nature (naturale is the noun used, not natura), to lose liberty b y force is utterly intolerable;69 as Bernardo himself has observed in another context, it is to lose the city’s soul. Here we are back at the key contention of Florentine libertarian­ ism, that whatever is the best form of government in theory, a high level of participation in government is natural to Florence; but as always, it is “ second” or “ acquired” nature that is meant. Soderini’s admission that liberty is a product of Florentine history links his thinking with Bernardo’s. W hen he asks the latter to expound his conception of the best form of government for Florence, Bernardo is enabled not only to accept the invitation— which in Book i he would have turned aside— but to go far toward including Soderini’s ideal of liberty, b y stressing that what is under discussion is not the best form of government in the abstract— presumably monarchy— which could only be considered in the context of a city being founded for the first time, but the best form for Florence as she is: that is, for a city which has “ made profession” of liberty to the point where the exclusive rule of one or a few could only be imposed b y force. T o escape the ensu­ ing evils, which would be at their worst in the case of oligarchy, the best hope is offered b y popular government; in theory the worst of the tolerable forms, it is proprio and naturale to Florence and involves least imposition b y violence. Further, if we were devising a popular government for a new city, we could rely on the teachings of philoso­ phy and the lessons o f recorded history, but since we are concerned 69 Ibid.: “Dunche quando voi dite che chi ha trattato de’ buoni governi non ha avuto questo obietto che le citta siano libere, ma pensato a quello che fa migliori effetti . . . io crederrei che questo fussi vero, quando da principio si edifica o instituisce una citta. . . . Ma quando una citta e gia stato in liberta ed ha fatta questa professione, in modo che si puo dire che el naturale suo sia di essere libera, allora ogni volta che la si riduce sotto el governo di uno, non per sua volunta o elezione, ma violentata . . . questo non puo accadere sanza scurare assai el nome suo ed infamarla appresso agli altri.” 250

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with a city actually existing, we must take into account “ the nature, the quality, the circumstances (considerazione), the inclinations and, to express all these terms in a single word, the humours (umori— Mon­ tesquieu might have said esprit) of the city and the citizens.” K n o w l­ edge of these umori is not gained through the study of history in the bookish sense. Guicciardini here employs his favorite analogy of the physician who, though freer than the statesman since he can give the patient whatever medicines he chooses, nevertheless administers only those which are both good for the disease and such as the patient’s body can tolerate, “ given its complexion and other attributes.” 70 It is not stated how the physician acquires his knowledge of complessione and accidenti, but one suspects that this is through practical experience. The doctrine of accidents enables Bernardo to accept Soderini’s scheme of values as part of the world with which he has to deal. The Florence of actuality is characterized b y an acquired second nature, a tissue of accidents built up through experience, use, and tradition, which can only empirically be known. This accidental fabric has come to embody the values to which Soderini makes appeal— equalita, liberta, onore, and virtii; and Bernardo, who in Book i had tended to dismiss them in favor of a rigorous inspection of the predictable consequences of specific governmental arrangements, is now prepared to admit them as facts, that is as values which Florentines cannot afford (being what they are) not to acknowledge, and even to acknowledge them himself as values, with the proviso that it is only the need to study Florentine actuality which compels him to do so. His attitude to values, then, is empirical; he is consenting to erect a scheme of government based on civic virtu because it is prudent to acknowledge the facts of Floren­ tine nature, of which a commitment to virtu is one. Guicciardini is not now locating the ottimati and their values in the highly specific context created by the events of 1494 and 1512, but in that created by usage and tradition, in which accidents accumulate and second nature is acquired. This much m ay be conceded to De Caprariis’s opinion that at this point he fell short of a rigorous historicism; but it can be argued in reply that the context he employed was 70 D. e D., pp. 97-99; especially p. 99: “ . . . non abbiamo a cercare di uno governo immaginato . . . ma considerato la natura, la qualita, le considerazioni, la inclinazione, e per strignere tutte queste cose in una parola, gli umori, della citta e de’ cittadini, cercare di uno governo che non siamo sanza speranza che pure si potessi persuadere ed introducere, e che introdotto, si potessi secondo el gusto nostro comportare e conservare, seguitando in questo lo esemplo de’ medici che, se bene sono piu liberi che non siamo noi, perche agli infermi possono dare tutte le medicine che pare loro, non gli danno pero tutte quelle che in se sono buone e lodate, ma quelle che lo infermo secondo la complessione sua ed altri accidenti e atto a sopportare.”

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the appropriate one for presenting optimate values in a historical set­ ting, and that once this had been done the constitution depicted in Book ii of the Dialogo became somewhat less abstract and unreal than De Caprariis seems to have believed— though we shall find that G u ic­ ciardini did not, indeed, think it likely to be historically realized. In Book i the ottimati were offered the choice between onore considered as a species of civic virtu, and a prudence which might well involve recognition that in the actual world the civic framework and its values had been destroyed by Medicean rule. In Book n existing optimate values are to be paramount; it is recognized that they are liberta, onore, and virtu ; and an attempt is to be made to discover the constitutional structure which these values necessitate. But Bernardo has begun by establishing that they are less intrinsic than given, part of the actual world which prudence must acknowledge, and he has committed the ottimati as well as himself to this recognition. T h ey must acknowledge that ambizione and the thirst for onore are part of their temporal natures, that they require to be satisfied but at the same time to be kept in check; the exercise of prudence may be the highest form of the display of virtu, and it may entail acceptance of a scheme of gov­ ernment in which the pursuit of onore is limited b y the power of oth­ ers. As against this, however, such a scheme may ensure that the exer­ cise of prudence is identical with that free pursuit of excellence which is the essence of liberta and virtu. Meanwhile, that part of the argument in which Florence is con­ trasted, as a citta disarmata, with Machiavellian Rome serves to estab­ lish that the conduct of external relations in a world not determined b y Florentine power is the most important single activity of govern­ ment, and that this requires the constant exercise of vigilanzia e diligenzia sottile. Only an experienced few can develop and display this quality, and the problem of constitution-making is largely a matter of reconciling their control of affairs with the maintenance of liberty. It is difficult to find the right medicine, because it must be of such a kind that in curing the stomach one does not injure the head; that is, one must be careful not to alter the substance of popular govern­ ment, which is liberty, or, in taking important decisions aw ay from those incompetent to make them, to give so much authority to par­ ticular persons as to risk setting up some kind of tyranny.71 71 D. e D., p. 101: “ . . . e difficile trovare el medicina appropriata, perche bisogna sia in modo che medicando lo stomaco non si offenda el capo, cioe provedervi di sorte che non si alteri la sustanzialita del governo populare che e la liberta, e che per levare le deliberazioni di momento di mano di chi non le intende, non si dia tanta autorita a alcuno particulare, che si caggia o si avii in una spezie di tirannide.” 252

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Since the external world is nonmoral, this problem m ay appear as one of reconciling facts with values, the brute necessities of survival with the need for moral relations within the city. Guicciardini is known for his skepticism and realism, and we may quite properly see it in this light. But Book n of the Dialogo is essentially value-oriented, and the reconciliation of leadership with liberty is a value problem on both sides of the equation. In exercising leadership and control the elite are displaying a virtue, which is prudence, and they are also pursuing values characteristically theirs, which are onore and virtu. A t this level prudence and virtii have become identical, so that the choice between them has disappeared. But we have repeatedly seen that onore and virtii are civic qualities which require a civic and public setting for their development. T h e point of Soderini’s emulative conception of virtii, which Bernardo is now able to adopt, is that it brings about the identification of aristocratic with popular government; since virtii is onore, a public and popular audience is required to acclaim it and give it meaning. T he few exist only in the m any’s sight. This must be so, since their special excellence, like any other secular and republican virtue, is liable to self-corruption if suffered to exist in isolation. If the recognition of virtii was left to the few who possess and seek to display it, the result could only be disastrous competition (ambizione) or cor­ rupt connivance and wheeler-dealing (intelligenza). For virtu to be recognized purely for what it is— for the recognition to be unflawed b y extraneous or private considerations— for the elite to be truly free to develop it— recognition must be a public act performed b y a public authority. Leaving aside the possibility, not further considered in Book ii, that this authority might be a quasi-monarchical Medicean govern­ ment, the remaining alternative is the Consiglio Grande. M eritocracy necessitates a measure of democracy. The liberta. of the few is to have their virtii acknowledged b y the res public a; the liberta of the many is to ensure that this acknowledgment is truly public and the rule of virtu and onore a true one. A complex polity, or “ mixed government,” is required both b y the need to balance liberta against prudence (the stomach against the head), and b y the nature of liberta itself. In both formulations it is essential that the popular assembly be prevented from trying to exer­ cise itself those virtues and functions whose exercise it oversees and guarantees in the few ; and it is no less essential that the few be pre­ vented from setting up an oligarchy, that is from monopolizing those virtues and functions within a rigidly closed governo stretto. In his theoretical constitution, therefore, Bernardo has two overriding, and interlocking, purposes: to confine the Consiglio Grande to those func­ tions which are essential to the maintenance of liberty, and to ensure 253

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that participation in the governing elite, which discharges all other functions, is determined solely by the public display of virtu. These aims necessitate a great deal of careful differentiation and distribution of powers, and it is striking to observe how nearly Guicciardini agreed that they had been attained in the Venetian model. The Consiglio has three essential functions.72 B y its existence alone it provides every person capable of holding office, that is to say every member of the city— Guicciardini does not revive the proposal, made in the Discorso di L ogrogn o, to enlarge the Consiglio by adding per­ sons not capable of office— with access to decision and opportunity of office; this is to ensure that equality which is the prime foundation of liberty. In theory, the governing elite was to be an open m eritocracy; no prior qualifications o f wealth or birth were to be laid down, and promotion to office was to rest solely on one’s fellows’ opinion of one’s merits. As a corollary, then, the Consiglio must fill all or nearly all the offices and magistracies of the city; the aim here is to ensure that no magistrate is indebted to any individual (privato) or clique (setta) for his office. The point is less that the people or many as a distinct group should have power to choose the government they want, than that the process of recognizing fitness for office should be conducted as publicly and as impersonally as possible. The people do not exercise sovereignty so much as ensure that the res publica (here a remote fore­ runner o f the general will) is the choosing agency, and we enter upon no discussion of the qualities of mind that enable them to recognize virtu in others. These qualities, however, do not disappear, for G u ic­ ciardini continues to prefer election of magistrates b y vote (le piu fave) to the w holly impersonal machinery of sortition. Men are unequal in merit, and only the reasoning mind is capable of choosing its superior. Th e third function which, in order to ensure the protection of liberty, is to be left in the Consiglio’s hands is that o f “ making new laws and altering old.” It is a temptation to refer to this as “ the legislative pow er” and to see its inclusion here as a rudimentary attempt at a definition of sovereignty. But we must be quite clear as to just what this legislative function is. The leggi or provisioni o f which Guicciardini speaks are essentially what Machiavelli calls ordini: those fundamental ordinances which give the polity its form by determining the distribution of the several political functions or powers. T h ey must be kept in the hands of the Consiglio, first, to ensure that the determination of the city’s form is untouched b y particular interests or pressures; secondly, because a free government can be altered only b y laws or b y arms, 72 For this and the following paragraph, see D. e D., pp. 102-103.

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and if we render impossible any mutazione b y means of law, other devices w ill prevent mutazione by armed force. In other words, the Consiglio’s function is less to legislate than to prevent legislation, which is still thought of largely as the determination of political form — a task which should be done once and then left unaltered. Nonetheless, there is implicit here the notion of some continuous activity of “ making new laws and altering old,” which may bring about mutazione if improp­ erly exercised, but can presumably be properly exercised so that it does not. Guicciardini does not define this permissible legislation for us, but since he did not believe that the form of a city could be perfectly estab­ lished once and for all,73 it is likeliest that he thought of it as the cor­ rection of earlier deficiencies and the rounding out of first principles in the light of further experience. But he does tell us how it is to be carried on. The Consiglio is assumed incapable of initiating legisla­ tion— only in consigli piu stretti is there the prudence which can cognize specific defects and remedies— and is excluded from all deliberazione, all framing and discussing of proposed legislation. It retains only the bare power of approvazione, of accepting or vetoing the pro­ posals laid before it b y smaller deliberative bodies. Significantly, G u ic­ ciardini does not examine here, as he had in the Discorso di Logrogno, the nature of the cognitive intellect which makes the many capable of evaluating what they cannot initiate or verbalize. If he had, he would no doubt have reproduced the Aristotelian doctrine of the cumulative judgment of the many, but it is more noteworthy that he did not and that, in place of their knowing what was best for themselves, he stressed once more their function of universalizing decision, of ensur­ ing that it was free from corrupting particular interests. Th e role of the many was less to assert the will of the non-elite than to maximize the impersonality of government; and, with many more extreme expo­ nents of the mito di Venezia, we wonder whether a machine might not be devised to do this more efficiently. Guicciardini, however, shows no desire to see this done. He remains (in this respect) a civic humanist: the essence of his governmental ideal is that the elite shall display virtu before the eyes of the non-elite. It is for this reason that the deliberazioni of the few require the approva­ zione of the many, and he is strongly opposed to any attempt b y the form er to trespass on the province of the latter. He repeats from the Discorso di L og ro gn o 74 his condemnation of existing Florentine pro­ cedure, w hereby new laws are proposed in the Consiglio, but must pass through a tangle of committees on their w ay to approval; this 73 See above, ch. v, nn. 17, 18, 44, 48. 74 See above, ch. v, nn. 30, 31.

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practice, he says, is plainly oligarchical, a device of existing powerholders to expose all possible reforms to destructive intervention by their confederates (sette). The correct procedure is to have new legis­ lation initiated and discussed only in open senate, accepted or rejected only in open Council.75 Guicciardini’s assumptions are in a sense ration­ alist; he affirms that reason and virtue are most likely to prevail where there is unrestricted access to decision, and though the functional dif­ ferentiation between elite and non-elite must be maintained, there comes a point where limiting the size of councils serves only to give undue weight to particular and sinister interests. The idea that the selfdetermination of the elite must be a public and open process is even more pronounced when he deals with election than when he deals with legislation. Since Florentine politics were not conceived of as those of a juris­ dictional society, legislation— the alteration of substantive law b y sov­ ereign will— did not seem as important to theorists as in the politics of a northern monarchy, and we already know that Machiavelli and G u ic­ ciardini regarded the management of external affairs as the most momentous single function of government. Since affairs of this kind were in constant daily change, they made the greatest demand on the prudenzia of the decision-makers, and it was therefore important both that their direction should be in the hands of a few and that these few should combine the greatest experience of such affairs with the maximum opportunity of enlarging that experience. The selection of magistrates to compose the political elite was very largely a matter of appointing men to deal with external affairs, and at this point there arose a clash of desiderata. On the one hand, the principles of equalitd and liberta required that all citizens should have the maximum oppor­ tunity of office, which suggested— as it had to the framers of the con­ stitution of 1494— that all magistracies should rotate as rapidly as possi­ ble; on the other, those of esperienzia and prudenzia required that magistrates should remain in office long enough to acquire experience and put it to use. Y et there was the danger that they would come to regard their offices as their own and behave corruptly and tyrannically. Guicciardini now argues that the Venetians have hit upon the best solution of this dilemma, in electing their doge for life, thus ensuring the benefits of his experience, but seeing to it that his authority is kept from becoming dangerous b y requiring the constant concurrence of others to make it effective.76 He proposes to adopt the Dogeship to 75 D. e D., pp. 124-25. 76 D. e D., pp. 103-104: “ Pero a me pare che a questo punto abbino proviso meglio e’ viniziani che facessi mai forse alcuna republica, con lo eleggere uno doge perpetuo, el quale e legato dagli ordini loro in modo che non e pericoloso alia 256

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Florentine conditions in the form of a gonfalonierate for life, instead of for very short terms as in the 1494 constitution; but this will neces­ sitate changes in the signoria, the executive board with whom the gonfaloniere is required to work. A t present membership of the signoria rotates very rapidly; every citizen wants his turn and the board is filled with men who understand what is happening so little that even a short­ term gonfaloniere can do much as he likes with them. T o develop a long-term signoria to balance a gonfaloniere for life would probably prove too difficult, and the best course may be to downgrade the signoria altogether, leaving the gonfaloniere to share power with a sen­ ate and its daily presidium, the “ ten of w ar.” He is to be permanent chairman of the latter, possessing no formal powers but relying on his personality and experience to bring him authority.77 The senate is to be the central organ and the embodiment of the elite of virtii. Guicciardini observes that it is a problem in constitu­ tional theory whether membership in a senate should be for life or for a limited term. The ancients opted for life; the Venetians rotate membership so rapidly that the pregati, as they call the equivalent body, are always largely made up of the same individuals. It makes relatively little difference which model we adopt.78 The technical prob­ lem is that of combining the maximum continuity and therefore concen­ tration of experience with the maximum expectation of eventual mem­ bership in the part of the aspiring, and if we have a large enough senate vacancies through death will occur often enough to give every­ one the hope of election some day if he deserves it. Guicciardini pre­ fers a senate elected for life for the same reasons as make him favor life tenure for the gonfalonierate: it ensures maximum concentration of experience, and it enables men to hope that their virtii w ill carry them to an office so secure that they need never fear, or feel indebted to, any other individual. In the case of the senate, as well, he seems to prefer election for life to rapid rotation because the individual will be the more certain that he owes his membership to public recognition, and not to the random operations of constitutional machinery. It is also suggested that Florentines, being more restless and ambitious than Venetians, are less willing to wait for their turns;79 better therefore to liberta, e nondimanco, per stare quivi fermo ne avere altra cura che questa, ha pensiero alle cose, e informato delle cose, e se bene non ha autorita di deliberarle, perche questo sarebbe pericoloso alia liberta, vi e pure uno capo a che riferirle e che sempre a’ tempi suoi le propone e le indirizza.” 77 D. e D., pp. 104, 113-14. 78 D. e D p. 115. 79 D. e D., p. 116: “ Ma questa misura ed ordine che ha partorito in loro la lunga continuazione del governo e forse la natura de’ loro cervelli piu quieta, non si potrebbe sperare in noi di qui a mold anni; e se noi facessimo questo consiglio

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create as large a senate as possible— 150 instead of the 80 of 1494— and bring in the maximum number of aspirants on a permanent basis. As the letter and spirit of this scheme emerge, more attention seems to be paid to the mobilization of virtu and the prevention of corrup­ tion than to ensuring the ascendancy of prudence; and the first two aims seem to require, in ways that the third does not, that the com­ petition to have one’s virtu recognized be an open one. W hen Piero Guicciardini asks whether a doge or gonfaloniere for life is not better suited to Venice than to Florence, since the former is an aristocratic and the latter a popular republic, Bernardo replies that there is no essen­ tial difference between the two. In each city there is a grand council made up of the whole citizen body, that is of all who have the right to hold office; if it is harder for incomers to secure that right at Venice, the difference is one of ordini only and does not amount to one in the spezie del governo. W hat is important is that within each citizen body— the popolo of Florence, the gentiluomini of Venice— there is formal equality of access to office; “ they make no distinctions of wealth or lineage, as is done where optimates rule,” and the Venetian system is as popular as the Florentine, the Florentine as optimate as the Venetian.80 In each system, we are to understand, the ruling elite emerge solely through the display of the necessary qualities and the recognition and choice of their fellows. If there is a difference of substance between Venice and Florence, it lies not in the formal commitment of either city to the principle of equality, but in that greater restlessness and ambition which marks the Florentine personality in the pursuit o f onore. Bernardo treats this characteristic with highly Aristotelian ambivalence. On the one hand it is desirable that men should be ambitious for that onore which can per sei mesi o per uno anno, se ne troverrebbono bene spesso esclusi tutti quelli che sarebbe necessario che vi fussino.” 80 D. e D., p. 106: “E se bene ha nome diverso da quello che vogliamo fare noi, perche si chiama governo di gentiluomini ed el nostro si chiamera di popolo, non per questo e di spezie diversa, perche non e altro che uno governo nel quale intervengono universalmente tutti quegli che sono abili agli uffici, ne vi si fa distinzione o per ricchezza o per stiatte, come si fa quando governano gli ottimati, ma sono ammessi equalmente tutti a ogni cosa, e di numero sono mold e forse piu che siano e’ nostri; e se la plebe non vi participa, la non participe anche a noi, perche infiniti artefici, abitatori nuovi ed altri simili, non entrano nel nostro consiglio. Ed ancora che a Vinezia gli inabili sono abilitati con piu difficulta agli uffici che non si fa a noi, questo non nasce perche la spezie del governo sia diversa, ma perche in una spezie medesimi hanno ordini diversi . . . e pero se noi chiamassimo gentiluomini e’ nostri, e questo nome appresso a noi non si dessi se non a chi e abile agli uffici, troveresti che el governo di Vinegia e popolare come el nostro e che el nostro non e manco governo di ottimati che sia el loro.” 258

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be won only by serving the res publica and to exclude ambition, so that they are content with mere security, is no longer the pragmatic realism of Book i, but an unattainable Platonic ideal. On the other, it is danger­ ous that ambizione should reach a point where honor is desired for its own sake, since the private good will now be set above the public good and men will soon become capable of doing anything whatever to get and retain it. H owever, men have this appetite, whether it is to be praised or condemned, and the political theorist must take account of it.81 N o r should a free government need to fear the ambition of its citizens; if properly directed it should lead to the emergence not merely of a governing elite, but of those three or four highly excep­ tional men on whose virtii, at any one time, nearly everything depends.82 T he proper direction of this laudabile o dannabile ambition takes several forms. In the first place, one must ensure that no office carries so much power that it is not limited b y the power of some other; this is w h y the gonfaloniere is to share executive authority with the “ ten” and the senate, and the senate to share legislative power with the Consiglio. This will not only keep the corrupt magistrate harmless, but actually prevent his corruption by reminding him constantly that what he has and is he shares with the public. In the second place, there must be offices of honor sufficiently numerous and graded, and changing hands often enough, to ensure that nobody is without hope of promo­ tion according to the merit he displays. In Bernardo’s ideal system, these gradi begin with election to the senate for life, rise through the 8 1D. e D., pp. 118-19: “E se bene io dissi ieri che e’ cittadini buoni non hanno volunta di governare, e che al bene essere delle citta basta che vi sia la sicurta, nondimeno questo e uno fondamento che fu piu facile a Platone a dirlo, che a chi si e maneggiato nelle republiche a vederlo, e piu rigoroso che non e oggi el gusto degli uomini, e’ quali hanno tutto per natura desiderio di essere stimati ed onorati. Anzi, come io dissi poco fa, e forse piu utile alle citta, che e’ suoi cittadini abbino qualche instinto di ambizione moderata, perche gli desta a pensieri ed azione onorevoli, che se la fussi al tutto morta. “ Ma non disputando ora questo, dico che poiche negli uomini e questo appetito, o laudabile o dannabile che sia, ed appicato in modo che non si puo sperare di spegnerlo, a noi che ragioniamo di fare uno governo, non quale doverebbe essere, ma quale abbiamo a sperare che possi essere, bisogna affaticarsi che tutti e’ gradi de’ cittadini abbino la satisfazione sua, pur che si facci con modo che non ofFenda la liberta.” 82 D. e D., p. 112: “ . . . le citta benche siano libere, se sono bene ordinate, sono sostentate dal consiglio e dalla virtu di pochi; e se pigliate dieci o quindici anni per volta insieme, troverete che in tale tempo non sono piu che tre o quattro cittadini da chi depende la virtu ed el nervo delle consulte ed azioni piu importanti.” Note that this is the first time we have found virtii used as a quality per­ taining to actions, rather than to persons.

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various magistracies which senators m ay assume and culminate with the supreme office of the gonfalonierate .83 But in the third place, it must be made plain at every point that office is the reward of public recognition of virtu and can never be owed to the private favor of individuals or cliques .84 Bernardo’s determination to ensure the last of these drives him to several proposals designed to open up the system, at some points going well beyond the confines of the Venetian paradigm. W hen the senate elects persons to those offices which are not in the gift o f the Consiglio Grande, it is to be afforced either b y a variety of lesser magistrates not otherwise o f its body, or else by one hundred commissioners elected by the Consiglio and sitting with the senate for this purpose only. The aim here is to prevent the senate from becoming a closed corporation, b y reminding its members that they must still take account of those whose good opinion put them in the senate originally, and to break up the sette and intelligenzie which will otherwise form within its bo d y .85 Deliberation, as opposed to election, is to be rigorously con­ fined to the life membership of the senate, but all debate is to take place in open and plenary sessions and the gonfaloniere, in his capacity a5 president, is to ensure that as many speak as possible, notably the reluctant, the inexperienced, and the relatively unknown .86 Guicciar83 D. e D., pp. 119-20: “E questo che noi abbiamo detto e sanza dubio grado che non gli nuoce, perche se bene sono senatori a vita, pure sono mold, hanno la autorita limitata in modo che non diventano signori, e nondimeno el grado e tale che debbe bastare a uno cittadino che non ha la stomaco corrotto di ambizione; perche se ha virtu mediocre, si debbe contentare di essere senatore; se e piu eccellente, verra di grado in grado agli onori piu alti: essere de’ dieci, essere della pratica, essere uno de’ disegnati per gonfaloniere quando vacassi.” 84D. e D., p. 112: “A questi (i.e., those of the highest virtu) sia proposta la speranza di uno grado estraordinario dove pensino di arrivare, non con sette, non con corruttele, non con violenzia, ma col fare opere egregie, col consumare tutta la sua virtu e vita per beneficio della patria, la quale, poiche ha a ricevere piu utile da questi tali che dagli altri, debbe anche allettargli piu che gli altri.” 85 D. e D., p. 121: “Le ragione che mi muovono a fare questa aggiunta sono due: l’una, che io non vorrei che a alcuno per essere diventato senatore paressi avere acconcio in modo le cose sua che giudicassi non avere piu bisogno degli altri che non sono del senato e tenessi manco conto della estimazione publica, come se mai piu non avessi a capitare a’ giudici degli uomini . . . L ’altra, che io non vorrei che per essere e’ senatori sempre quegli medesimi, una parte di essi facessi qualche intelligenzia che facessi girare e’ partiti in loro, esclusi gli altri, . . . Questa aggiunta rimedia benissimo a tutt’a dua gli inconvenienti, perche rompera le sette, intervenendovi tanto piu numero e di persone che si variano; e da altro canto non potendo questi aggiunti essere eletti loro, non aranno causa di favorire per ambi­ zione sua la larghezza, ma si volteranno ragionevolmente con le fave a chi sara giudicato che meriti piu; e quando parte del senato malignassi, questi daranno sempre el tracollo alia bilancia.” 86 D. e D p. 122. 260

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dini is balancing the hierarchical principle that the most experienced should take the lead against the egalitarian principle that the elite must be reinforced b y giving the greatest number opportunity to acquire experience and develop virtu; he is also not unaware that cliques and corruption could arise if the same individuals took the lead all the time. But a reputation as an intelligent commentator in debate, he says, will bring a man more esteem than a two-months tenure of the gonfalonierate, even if he never holds office at all; and if this is the accepted road to office and advancement, crooked means will not be used.87 Guicciardini’s antipathy to private alliances and relationships in poli­ tics, and his belief in countering these b y wide public participation, are most clearly stated in his discussion of the mode of electing the gonfaloniere. Here he holds the Venetians to have made a mistake: anxious to avoid the extremes of popular ignorance and optimate ambi­ tions and rivalries, they have set up an elaborate machinery of indirect election and drawn ballots, designed to produce at the end of the process forty-one men to choose the doge, whose names could not pos­ sibly have been predicted at the beginning, so that no intrigues or canvassing can occur. But all this is beside the point. Either the fortyone will be nobodies, in which case they will be ignorant and inexperi­ enced; or they will be men of substance, with interests, alliances, and ambitions of their own, in which case their choice will be predeter­ mined b y private considerations. In practice the latter is what happens; a knowledgeable observer of Venetian politics can usually predict who w ill be doge once he knows the names of the forty-one, because he will know their dependenzie. It is true that even so they will elect one of the five or six best qualified citizens, but corruption has not been sufficiently eliminated.88 Here we return to basic principles. E ve ry city consists of a many and a few , a popolo and a senato, and the normal road to power and influence lies through alliance with one or the other. Guicciardini now develops a somewhat Polybian argument;89 it m ay be legitimate enough to defend people against senate or senate against people, but the nature o f man is insatiable and we pass im perceptibly from defending our own to claiming what is another’s.90 Either strategy in the end produces harmful results, but it is easy in principle so to arrange matters that the aspirant to office must be acceptable to both parties. Let the senate 87 D. e D., p. 123. 88 D. e D., pp. 130-32. 89 D. e D pp. 132-35. 90 D. e D., p. 133: “E queste contenzione, se bene qualche volta nascono da onesti principi, pure vanno poi piu oltre, perche la natura degli uomini e insaziabile, e chi si muove alle imprese per ritenere el grado suo e non essere oppresso, quando poi si e condotto a questo, non si ferma quivi ma cerca di amplificarlo piu che lo onesto e per consequente di opprimere ed usurpare quello di altri.” 261

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meet and choose persons b y lot to draw up a panel of forty or fifty candidates. The three of these who receive the most votes— irrespec­ tive of whether one has an absolute m ajority or not— must be voted on b y the Consiglio Grande on another day, and if one has an absolute majority, let him be gonfalonier e\ if not, let three other finalists be selected and the process repeated until a victor emerges. The partici­ pation of the senate ensures that the final candidates are men of stand­ ing; that of the people ensures that the final outcome is not determined b y intra-elite rivalries. Each contributes to ensure that the merit of the individual is recognized as publicly and impersonally as possible.91 Guicciardini, it is clear, is not an uncritical follower of the mito di Venezia, but he has Bernardo conclude his constitutional exposition with a conventional panegyric on the best form of government known to all time; he has already praised it— with the qualification per una citta disarmata— on the grounds of its centuries-old stability,92 and here he even more conventionally adds that it combines the merits, while avoiding the disadvantages, of rule by the one, the few , and the many.93 But this is not the real scaffolding of his thought on the sub­ ject of Venice. A fully Polybian theory would assert that monarchy, aristocracy, and dem ocracy had each its peculiar merit, or virtii, but that each tended to self-corruption in isolation; a true mixed govern­ ment would employ each virtii to check the degeneration of the others, and in fully developed versions of the mito, as we shall see, it was usually added that the Venetians had achieved this b y mechanical and self-perpetuating devices. Guicciardini set little store b y these last, in comparison with the open recruitment of an elite of virtil\ and it is his use of that key term that distinguishes his thought from schematic Polybianism. He does not attribute a separate virtu to each of the three forms, because he uses the word in such a w ay as to define it as a quality of the elite or few. W e have repeatedly seen that the many are essential to his scheme, and they do not function in it without exer­ cising some form of intelligence and judgment which is their own and not that of the elite. But Guicciardini nowhere tells us what it is or defines it as a virtii; the function of his many is to be a context for the few , and when in the passage under scrutiny he states that the chief good of popular government is “ the conservation of liberty,” he instantly adds “ the authority of the laws and the security of every 9 1D. e D., p. 135. 92 D. e D., p. 106: “ A me pare che el governo viniziano per una citta disarmata sia cosi bello come forse mai avessi alcuna republica libera; ed oltre che lo mostra la esperienzia, perche essendo durato gia centinaia di anni florido ed unito come ognuno sa, non si puo attribuire alia fortuna o al caso, lo mostrano ancora molte ragioni che appariranno meglio nel ragionare di tutta questa materia.” ^ D . e D . , pp. 138-39. 26 2

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man” 94— m oving down the scale toward that private and nonparticipatory definition of liberty set out in Book i. N o r has the one— the gonfaloniere or doge— any virtu of his own distinguishable from the esperienzia, prudenzia, and honorable ambition of the few ; he is simply the culmination of the elitist edifice. Guicciardini does not idealize Venice as a synthesis of different forms of virtii because, at bottom, he recognizes only one, and since this is an attribute of the few , the roles of the one and the many must remain ancillary. Machiavelli had departed even further from the Polybian-Venetian paradigm because he saw virtu as the attribute of the armed many; Guicciardini’s skepticism about this reading of Roman history is of less importance than his regretful conviction that the Florentine militia was beyond revival. But in terms both of historical reality and of preferred values, his conception of virtii was aristo­ cratic. The problem then was to prevent the corruption and decay of the few , specifically of the Florentine ottimati. The one and the many provided the structure in which the virtu of the few — more prudent and less dynamic than Machiavellian virtu— might continue to be autonomously directed toward the common good; but since they did not exercise virtu specifically their own, we are not being shown a Polybian structure in which the polity is a combination of different forms of virtu and its stability is ensured b y their checking each other from degeneration. T h e Dialogo is not a treatise on how the mixed government may remain stable in a world where degeneration is the norm, or on how virtii may act to prevent the ascendance of fortuna. Guicciardini was too directly concerned with the historic dilemma of the Florentine ottimati to engage in so theoretical an inquiry; he knew that the alternative to a successful vivere civile was not some general­ ized form of cyclical decay, but the reestablishment of Medicean rule in a new and less advantageous relationship to the optimate class. It can however be shown that the supremacy o f fortune is, in some ulti­ mate sense, one of the poles within which his highly individual thought developed. Bernardo concludes b y remarking that as far back as can be read in Florentine history, the city has never enjoyed good government; there has been either the tyranny of one (as under the M edici), the insolent and self-destructive domination o f the few , the license o f the multitude, or the supreme irrationality of oligarchy and mob rule in conjunction. “ Unless chance (sorte) or the m ercy of G od give us grace (grazia) to arrive at some such form of government as this, we must fear the same 94 D. e D., p. 139: “E l consiglio grande ha seco quello bene che e principale nel governo del popolo, cioe la conservazione della liberta, la autorita delle legge e la sicurta di ognuno . . 263

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evils as have come about in the past.” 95 Soderini asks what hope there is that this will ever happen, and Bernardo’s reply is a disquisition on the w ays in which good governments are founded.90 T h ey come about either by force or by persuasion. A prince possessing absolute power m ay decide to lay it down and institute a republic. In theory this will be very easy, as none can resist him and a people passing suddenly from tyranny to liberty will think themselves in paradise and repose infinite faith in him; they will see, says Guicciardini in language which recalls M achiavelli’s treatment of the ideal legislator, that fortune has played no part in his decision, but that all depends upon his virtu to a degree which makes the latter more than human.97 In the real world, however, the exercise of absolute power will either have created such hatreds that he dare not lay it down or (more probably) will have so far cor­ rupted his character that he will not really want to (Augustus is the example here).98 A private citizen may seek supreme power in order to reform the city, as did Lycurgus, but the same considerations apply; force and power tend to be self-perpetuating.99 There remains persua95 D. e D., pp. 139-40: “Sarebbe adunche el governo vostro simile al governo loro; ed essendo el suo ottimo, el vostro almanco sarebbe buono e sarebbe sanza dubio quale non ha mai veduto la citta nostra. Perche o noi siamo stati sotto uno, come a tempo de’ Medici, che e stato governo tirannico, o pochi cittadini hanno potuto nella citta . . . che in fatto hanno oppressi e tenuti in servitu gli altri con mille ingiurie ed insolenzie, e tra loro medesimi sono stati pieni di sedizioni . . . o la e stata in arbitrio licenzioso della moltitudine . . . o e stato qualche vivere pazzo, dove in uno tempo medesimo ha avuto licenzia la plebe e potesta e’ pochi. . . . Pero se la sorte o la benignita di Dio non ci da grazia di riscontrare in una forma di governo come questa o simile, abbiano a temere de’ medesimi mali che sono stati per el passato.” 96 D. e D., pp. 141-45. 97 D. e D., pp. 141-42: “E ’ governi buoni si introducono o con la forza o con la persuasione: la forza sarebbe quando uno che si trovassi principe volessi deponere el principato e constituire una forma di republica, perche a lui starebbe el commandare e ordinare; e questo sarebbe modo facilissimo, si perche el popolo che stava sotto la tirannide e non pensava alia liberta, vedendosi in uno tratto menare al vivere libero con amore e sanza arme, benche si introducessi ordinato e con moderato larghezza, gli parebbe entrare in paradiso e piglierebbe tutto per guadagno . . . gli sarebbe prestata fede smisurata . . . Non si potrebbe di questa opera attribuire parte alcuna alia fortuna, ma tutto dependerebbe dalla sua virtu, ed el frutto che ne nascessi non sarebbe beneficio a pochi ne per breve tempo, ma in quanto a lui, a infiniti e per molte eta.” 98 D. e D., p. 142. 99D. e D., pp. 142-43: “ Si introducerebbe anche el governo per forza quando uno cittadino amatore della patria vedessi le cose essere disordinate, ne gli bastando el cuore poterle riformare voluntariamente e dacordo, si ingegnassi con la forza pigliare tanta autorita che potessi constituire uno buono governo etiam a dispetto degli altri, come fece Licurgo quando fece a Sparta quelle sante leggi. . . . Pero bisogna che la forza duri tanto che abbia preso piede; e quanto piu durassi, 264

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sion, by which is evidently meant a collective decision b y the citizens to set up good government; but for this to come about they must have had sufficient experience to know both the evils of bad government and the remedies for it, and must have suffered misfortunes great enough to teach them without either destroying them or driving them into violent conflicts and extreme causes. If the 1494 constitution should m iscarry, there will be a move for a stato stretto but— Guicciar­ dini is exercising hindsight here— a likelier outcome is a gonfaloniere with increased powers.100 All will then depend on his character and position; Guicciardini’s readers know that what is to come is the inef­ fective rule of Piero Soderini, but Bernardo says there is a slim chance that a strong and wise gonfaloniere, especially if appointed for life, will institute a constitution truly of the Venetian pattern.101 T he explicit conclusion is that Florence in 1494 is still too much at the m ercy of fortune to allow much hope of a stabilized republic.102 It seems also to be implied, at least to some extent, that such a republic is the only alternative to the rule of fortune; Guicciardini, we know, believes that its power over its own citizens is the only form of power not radically violent or unjust. But the realm of fortune is not—in theory it could but need not be— one of totally random and unpre­ dictable happenings. Since 1513 Guicciardini had been anatomizing what was in fact emerging out of the failure of republican govern­ ment— a restored Medicean system in which the intense hostility of the popolo, deprived of their Consiglio Grande, rendered the Medici more suspicious and the ottimati less able to act as an independent counter­ weight to them. He now has Bernardo conclude the main theme of the tanto piu sarebbe pericoloso che non gli venissi voglia di continuarvi drento. Sapete come dice el proverbio: che lo indugio piglia vizio.” 100 D. e D., p. 143: “ Ci e adunche necessario fare fundamento in su la persuasione, e questa ora non sarebbe udita; ma io non dubio che le cose andranno in modo che innanzi che passi troppo tempo, si cognoscera per molti la maggiore parte de’ disordini, e combattera in loro da uno canto la voglia di provedervi, da l’altro la paura di non ristrignere troppo el governo. Ed in questo bisognera, a mio giudicio, che giuochi la fortuna della citta . . . Potrebbe ancora essere che questi disordini fussino grandi, ma tali che piu presto travagliassino la citta che la ruinassino, ed allora el punto sara che chi ara a fare questa riforma la pigli bene, perche sempre fara difficulta grande el dubio ch’e’ cittadini principali non voglino riducere le cose a uno stato stretto; pero potra essere che gli uomini si voltino piu presto a uno gonfaloniere a vita o per lungo tempo che a altro, perche dara loro manco ombra che uno senato perpetuo, e perche per questo solo la citta non resta bene ordinata.”

101 Ibid. 102 D. e D., p. 144: “Pero concludendo vi dico che ho per molto dubio e mi pare che dependa molto dalla potesta della fortuna, se questo governo disordinato si riordinera o no . . .” 265

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Dialogo— Roman history and some other topics are still to be dis­ cussed— by expatiating on this possibility, after which he reminds Soderini, Capponi, and Piero Guicciardini that though they will doubtless endeavor to reform the republic, they may not succeed. Success in any political enterprise is a matter of tempo and occasione, and the times cannot be said to be propitious. If the times are against one, circum­ stances may arise in which the only strategy is to temporize and con­ form, since the attempt to innovate may bring about worse evils yet.103 W ith this we return from the realm of value into that of history, or, to use the terminology we have found most effective in interpreting Guicciardini, from that of virtii into that of prudence. In the ideal republic prudence appeared as a form of virtu, that is, o f morally free and unforced civic behavior. But it could always bear the meaning of doing the best one could with what one could not help getting; and in this sense it might be the appropriate conduct for a world in which the republican experiment had collapsed and the ottimati found them­ selves allied not with the popolo, among whom they could display virtu if they were ever accepted as natural leaders, but with the Medici on terms which could never again be those that had obtained before 1494. Guicciardini never failed to emphasize that the revolution of that year had been a mutazione, an imiovazione, after which everything was changed and the future was hard to predict or to control. The rhetoric for depicting such consequences was the rhetoric of fortune; and the quality we have been calling prudence might therefore appear preeminently the quality of intellect and personality with which the intelligent aristocrat sought to govern himself and others, in the world of fortuna. W hen Guicciardini wrote the D ialogo, it still seemed worthwhile to devise a civic setting in which virtii and prudence could function together and develop to the full. T he world of fortuna and prudence in naked confrontation does not appear in his writings until the R icordi of 1528 and 1530, because only then did he face the full reality of optimate isolation between Medici and popolo. These were the years of the last republic and the Great Siege, in which an increasingly revo­ lutionary popular government drove out the ottimati— including G u ic­ 103 D. e D., p. 146: “Perche le medesime imprese che fatte fuora di tempo sono difficillime o impossibile diventono facillime quando sono accompagnate dal tempo o dal occasione, ed a chi le tenta fuora del tempo suo non solo non gli riescono ma e pericolo che lo averle tentate non le guasti per quello tempo che facilmente sarebbono riuscite, e questa e una delle ragione che e’ pazienti sono tenuti savi . . . e del resto piu presto andate comportando e temporeggiatevi el meglio che potete, che desideriate novita, perche non vi potra venire cosa che non sia peggio.” The language of Lodovico Alamanni: the wise never innovate. 266

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ciardini himself— and defied the Medici in w ays which ensured that the latter could return only as absolute princes. A t the end of the Siege, Guicciardini was to react b y helping the Medici reimpose themselves and b y engaging personally in their savage purge of the defeated popu­ lar leaders;104 but d u /n g its course he employed his enforced leisure b y completing a critique of Machiavelli’s Discorsi and a collection of aphorisms in which we clearly see the world as it then appeared to him. A dominant— perhaps the overmastering— theme of these R icordi is the extraordinary difficulty of applying intelligence to the world of events in the form of personal or political action. W hen all the books have been read, the lessons learned, and the conclusions digested— Guicciardini never for a moment suggests that these preliminaries do not have to be gone through— there remains the problem of convert­ ing thought into action;105 and even when experience has brought an accidental knowledge of particulars that natural intelligence cannot provide,106 that problem remains, lyin g beyond any conceivable sys­ tematization of knowledge, as the problem of judging time, o f deter­ mining the moment to act, and the considerations relevant to both the moment and the action.107 It is easy to see that the fool m ay fail to understand what is happening; Guicciardini sees that the very intelli­ gent man m ay overreact to what he sees happening,108 so that he 104 For this phase of Guicciardini’s career see Ridolfi, L ife , chs. x v iii - x x . 105Ricordi, C 22 (Spongano, p. 27, cited above, ch. v, n. 22): “ Quante volte si dice: se si fussi fatto o non fatto cosi, saria succeduta o non succeduta la tale cosa! che se fussi possibile vederne el paragone, si conoscerebbe simile openione essere false.” 106 Ricordi, C 9, 10 (Spongano, pp. 13-14): “Leggete spesso e considerate bene questi ricordi, perche e piu facile a conoscergli e intendergli che osservargli: e questo si facilita col farsene tale abito che s’abbino freschi nella memoria. “Non si confidi alcuno tanto nella prudenza naturale che si persuada quella bastare sanza l’accidentale della esperienzia, perche ognuno che ha maneggiato faccende, benche prudentissimo, ha potuto conoscere che con la esperienzia si aggiugne a molte cose, alle quali e impossibile che el naturale solo possa aggiugnere.” Cf. B 71, 100, 121. 107 Ricordi, C 78-85; especially 79 (Spongano, p. 90): “Sarebbe pericoloso proverbio, se non fussi bene inteso, quello che si dice: el savio debbe godere el beneficio del tempo; perche, quando ti viene quello che tu desideri, chi perde la occasione non la ritruova a sua posta: e anche in molte cose e necessaria la celerita del risolversi e del fare; ma quando sei in partiti difficili o in cose che ti sono moleste, allunga e aspetta tempo quanto puoi, perche quello spesso ti illumina o ti libera. Usando cosi questo proverbio, e sempre salutifero; ma inteso altrimenti, sarebbe spesso pernizioso.” 108 Ricordi, B 96 (Spongano, p. 28): “Le cose del mondo sono si varie e dependono da tanti accidenti, che difficilmente si puo fare giudicio del futuro; e si vede per esperienzia che quasi sempre le conietture de’ savi sono fallace: pero non laudo el consiglio di coloro che lasciano la commodita di uno bene presente, 2 67

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imagines it to be happening faster and more completely than it is.109 W here Machiavelli had thought it better to act than to temporize, since time was likely to worsen one’s position, Guicciardini can see the strength of the case for temporization, since nothing can worsen one’s position more than one’s own ill-considered actions. But both men are clear that the domain of im perfectly predictable happenings— G u ic­ ciardini salutes Aristotle for laying it down that there can be no deter­ mined truth about future contingencies110— is the domain o f jortuna. A ll the ricordi which are relevant to this problem should be read as the counterpart to chapter xxv of 11 Principe and to those chapters of the Discorsi which deal with the problems of action in a society which has begun to be corrupt. On several occasions in the R icordi— echoing passages in the Dialogo and in the Considerations on Machiavelli"s Discourses which G uicciar­ dini wrote about this period— there appear criticisms of Machiavelli’s treatment of Roman history, a recurrent theme of which is the naivete of supposing that one can imitate Roman examples under very different conditions.111 Around this there has sprung up a literature which con­ trasts Machiavelli’s supposedly idealistic belief in historical parallels and recurrences with Guicciardini’s supposedly more realistic under­ standing that no two situations are exactly alike and that one must play them by ear rather than b y the book.112 But it is possible that this con­ benche minore, per paura di uno male futuro, benche maggiore, se non e molto propinquo o molto certo; perche, non succedendo poi spesso quello di che temevi, ti truovi per una paura vana avere lasciato quello che ti piaceva. E pero e savio proverbio: di cosa nasce cosa.” 109 Ricordi, C 71 (Spongano, p. 82): “ Se vedete andare a cammino la declinazione di una citta, la mutazione di uno governo, lo augumento di uno imperio nuovo e altre cose simili—che qualche volta si veggono innanzi quasi certe— avvertite a non vi ingannare ne’ tempi: perche e moti delle cose sono per sua natura e per diversi impedimenti molto piu tardi che gli uomini non si immaginano, e lo ingannarti in questo ti puo fare grandissimo danno: avvertiteci bene, che e uno passo dove spesso si inciampa. Interviene anche el medesimo nelle cose private e particulari, ma molto piu in queste publiche e universali, perche hanno, per essere maggiore mole, el moto suo piu lento, e anche sono sottoposte a piu accidenti.” Cf. C 34, 115, 116, 162, 191; B 76, 103. 110 Ricordi, C 58 (Spongano, p. 67): “Quanto disse bene el filosofo: De futuris contingentibus non est determinata veritasl Aggirati quanto tu vuoi, che quanto piu ti aggiri, tanto piu truovi questo detto verissimo.” 111 Ricordi, C n o (Spongano, p. 12 1): “ Quanto si ingannono coloro che a ogni parola allegano e Romani! Bisognerebbe avere una citta condizionata come era loro, e poi governarsi secondo quello esemplo: el quale a chi ha le qualita disproporzionate e tanto disproporzionate, quanto sarebbe volere che uno asino facessi el corso di uno cavallo.” 112 E.g., Sir Herbert Butterfield, The Statecraft of Machiavelli (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1940, 1955). 268

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trast has been overstated. Both men lived in a conceptual world where fortuna was held to be both unpredictable and recurrent; Guicciardini declares in both final drafts of the R icordi that everything recurs, though it does not look the same and is very hard to recognize;113 and Machiavelli knew well enough that the lessons of history were difficult to apply and that this was part of the whole problem of action in time. There is little separating them here but emphasis and temperament. The important difference between the two men is not a question of historical sophistication, but lies in the fact that Machiavelli used the term virtu to denote the creative power of action to shape events, whereas Guicciardini had little faith in this power and did not use the term virtu to describe it. Both men found virtii used to denote behav­ ior constitutive of a system of morality in action; but Machiavelli’s most daring intellectual step was to retain the term to denote aspects of the individual’s behavior in the domain of war outside the city and after the civic universe had collapsed, and Guicciardini employed it only with reference to the civic setting. II Principe and the R icordi both depict the individual in the post-civic w orld; but Machiavelli’s individual is a ruler seeking to shape events through virtii in the sense of audacity, Guicciardini’s a patrician seeking to adapt himself to events through prudence. Both men hold that audacity and prudence are appropriate in different circumstances, that these circumstances are brought to us b y fortuna, and that it is exceedingly difficult for the individual to tell what they require. If we compare the two writers’ thoughts on the civic and republican fram ework, we find that their conceptions of virtii can be further differentiated in relation to their thought about arms and war. From II Principe, where virtu appears as limited but real creative power, Machiavelli went on to complete the Discorsi and the A rte della G uerra, concerned with the armed popular state where the foundation of civic was m ilitary virtu and the republic could tame its environment b y arms. Before he wrote the R ico rd i, Guicciardini had completed the Dialogo, in which he considered and rejected the Roman paradigm and 113 Ricordi, C 76 (Spongano, p. 87): “Tutto quello che e stato per el passato e e al presente, sara ancora in futuro; ma si mutano e nomi e le superficie delle cose in modo, che chi non ha buono occhio non le riconosce, ne sa pigliare regola o fare giudicio per mezzo di quella osservazione.” Cf. B 114 (ibid.): “ . . . le cose medesime ritornano, ma sotto diversi nomi e colori.” B 140 (Spongano, p. 82): “Le cose del mondo non stanno ferme, anzi hanno sempre progresso al cammino a che ragionevolmente per sua natura hanno a andare e finire; ma tardano piu che non e la opinione nostra, perche noi le misuriamo secondo la vita nostra che e breve e non secondo el tempo loro che e lungo; e pero sono e passi suoi piu tardi che non sono e nostri, e si tardi per sua natura che, ancora che si muovino, non ci accorgiamo spesso de’ suoi mod: e per questo sono spesso falsi e’ giudici che noi facciamo.” 269

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settled for the citta disarmata, where the essential skill was that of adaptation to the environment through prudence. Consequently, virtu had no meaning for him outside the civic setting, where it was identi­ cal with prudence; and when the republic and its virtu had van­ ished together, prudence remained the instrument of the post-civic individual.114 The only alternative remaining— our basic model informs us— was faith, reposed in providence or prophecy, as operations of grace: that faith which Savonarolans were still placing in the messianic destiny of Florence. Guicciardini inserts in the R icordi an analysis of the faith which moves mountains, considered as a purely unreasonable persistence in the teeth of circumstances; capable, if raised to a suffi­ cient height of exaltation, of doing the w ork of virtu, triumphing over contingencies and shaping them in ways which no reasonable observer could have predicted. It is faith of this order which has nerved the Florentines to d efy the armies of pope and emperor together for more than seven months, and the faith in question is reposed in the prophecies o f Savonarola.115 It is also indicated that this faith is a madness, which consists in trusting oneself w holly to fortuna .116 114 Ricordi, C 51 (Spongano, p. 60): “Chi si travaglia in Firenze di mutare stati, se non lo fa per necessita, o che a lui tocchi diventare capo del nuovo governo, e poco prudente, perche mette a pericolo se e tutto el suo, se la cosa non succede; succedendo, non ha a pena una piccola parte di quello che aveva disegnato. E quanta pazzia e giuocare a uno giuoco che si possa perdere piu sanza comparazione che guadagnare! E quello che non importa forse manco, mutato che sia lo stato, ti oblighi a uno perpetuo tormento: d’avere sempre a temere di nuova mutazione.” 115 Ricordi, C 1 (Spongano, p. 3): “Quello che dicono le persone spirituali, che chi ha fede conduce cose grandi, e, come dice lo evangelio, chi ha fede puo comandare a’ monti ecc., procede perche la fede fa ostinazione. Fede non e altro che credere con openione ferma e quasi certezza le cose che non sono ragionevole, o se sono ragionevole, crederle con piu resoluzione che non persuadono le ragione. Chi adunche ha fede diventa ostinato in quello che crede, e procede al cammino suo intrepido e resoluto, sprezzando le difficulta e pericoli, e mettendosi a soportare ogni estremita: donde nasce che, essendo le cose del mondo sottoposte a mille casi e accidenti, puo nascere per molti versi nella lunghezza del tempo aiuto insperato a chi ha perseverato nella ostinazione, la quale essendo causata dalla fede, si dice meritamente: chi ha fede ecc. Esemplo a’ di nostri ne e grandissimo questa ostinazione de’ Fiorentini che, essendosi contro a ogni ragione del mondo messi a aspettare la guerra del papa e imperadore sanza speranza di alcuno soccorso di altri, disuniti e con mille difficulta, hanno sostenuto in sulle mura gia sette mesi gli eserciti, e quali non si sarebbe creduto che avessino sostenuti sette di, e condotto le cose in luogo che, se vincessino, nessuno piu se ne maraviglierebbe, dove prima da tutti erano giudicato perduti: e questa ostinazione ha causata in gran parte la fede di non potere perire, secondo le predizione di fra Ieronimo da Ferrara.” 116 Ricordi, C 136 (Spongano, p. 148): “Accade che qualche volta e’ pazzi fanno maggiore cose che e’ savi. Procede perche el savio, dove non e necessitato, si 270

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Dialogo

But the thought of Guicciardini diverges from that of Machiavelli at the point where each man assesses the role of armed virtu and of arms themselves as a cause of virtii: a problem closer to the ultimate concerns of W estern political thought than has always been under­ stood. Guicciardini was as well aware of the nonmoral element in poli­ tics as Machiavelli, but he employed virtii only as a compendium for the values of civic humanism. Machiavelli was as well aware of those values as Guicciardini, but he held them to be contingent on a people’s ability to control its environment b y arms, which he called its virtu. Guicciardini— the greater realist, perhaps, in his assessment of Floren­ tine m ilitary capacity— was able, in choosing Venice as typical of the citta disarmata, to develop the image of a society in which those values were realized in purity; Book n of the Dialogo is a statement of the civic ideal such as Machiavelli never attempted. T h e role o f Venice was to be paradigmatic for civic humanism, and below the level at which the Venetian image was a m yth of Polybian stability, it fur­ nished paradigms for the conversion of classical political values into actual or nearly actual political arrangements. The writings of Donato Giannotti, like those of Guicciardini himself, show us the paradigms in action as conceptual tools; those of Gasparo Contarini show us the symbolic development of the myth. rimette assai alia ragione e poco alia fortuna, el pazzo assai alia fortuna e poco alia ragione: e le cose portate dalla fortuna hanno talvolta fini incredibili. E ’ savi di Firenze arebbono ceduto alia tempesta presente; e’ pazzi, avendo contro a ogni ragione voluto opporsi, hanno fatto insino a ora quello che non si sarebbe creduto che la citta nostra potessi in modo alcuno fare: e questo e che dice el proverbio Audaces fortuna iuvatT

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G IAN N O T TI AN D CON TARIN I Venice as Concept and as Myth

[i] d o n a t o g i a n n o t t i (1492-1573) is known, if at all, to readers of E ng­ lish as “ the most excellent describer of the commonwealth of V enice” (the phrase is Harrington’s 1656)1 and by less specific state­ ments to the effect that he was the intellectual heir of Machiavelli and the last major thinker in the Florentine republican tradition. N o detailed study of his thought has yet been written in English,2 but we have gone far enough in the present analysis to have uncovered an anomaly in his received reputation: it is odd, on the face of it, that the same man should have been at once an admirer of Venice and an admirer of Machiavelli. And the oddity grows as we look deeper, for Giannotti proves to have employed his detailed knowledge of Vene­ tian procedures to construct a model of Florentine government which was both markedly popular and founded upon a citizen militia; both concepts very far removed from the aristocratic citta disarmata dis­ cerned by Machiavelli and Guicciardini. The fact is, as already indi­ cated, that his conception of Venice is rather instrumental than ideal; he does not set up the serenissima republica as a model to be imitated, but treats it as a source of conceptual and constitutional machinery which can be adapted for use in the very difficult circumstances of Florentine popolare politics. He is aided to do this by the fact that the Aristotelian-Polybian model of mixed government, which Venice

1 A t the beginning of the Preliminaries to Oceana; see Toland, ed., p. 35 (above, ch. 1, n. 28). 2 For his life and career, see Roberto Ridolfi, Opuscoli di Storia Letter aria e di Erudizione (Florence: Libr. Bibliopolis, 1942) ; Randolph Starns, Donato Gian­ notti and his Epistolae (Geneva: Libr. Droz, 1968); and the publication by Felix Gilbert described in the next note. R. von Albertini (op.cit.) devotes pp. 14-66 to a study of his thought, as does Starns in “Ante Machiavel: Machiavelli and Giannotti” (Gilmore, ed., Studies on Machiavelli) and there is a short account, which seeks to relate him to English thought of the Shakespearean age, in C. C. Huffman, Coriolanus in Context (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1972), pp. 17-20. 272

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exemplifies, can be given either an aristocratic or a democratic bias without losing its essential shape. Giannotti, who specifically acknowl­ edges his indebtedness to Aristotle and Polybius, as well as to Machia­ velli, may be thought of, from our point of view, as a contributor of originality, if not of direct influence, to the theory of mixed govern­ ment; he is the first author we shall meet of certain general assertions which were to recur in the history of this branch of republican thought. A t the same time we may see him as continuing a tendency whereby M achiavelli’s thought was reabsorbed into the tradition of Aristotelian republicanism and the edges of its drastic originality soft­ ened and blurred. On neither innovazione, virtu, nor even milizia is Giannotti’s thinking as abrasive or as creative as that of his older friend. But the more w e discount the legend of the “ wicked M achiavel,” the harder it becomes to see just how Machiavelli’s true intentions were imparted to European tradition. As later W estern republicanism grew, at all events, his image became progressively more orthodox and moral. As already indicated by his habit of citing his authorities, Giannotti is a more form ally academic thinker than either Machiavelli or G u ic­ ciardini; his political commitment is real, but his thought does not grow out of the tormenting experience of citizenship in the same w ay that theirs did. As a young man he frequented the Orti Oricellari and was friendly with Machiavelli while the latter was writing his history of Florence. From 1520 to 1525 he taught (and it is highly probable from the tone of his later writings that at some time he taught political theory) at the university of Pisa. In 1525-1527 he spent much of his time in Padua and Venice, and it was during this time that he wrote most of his Libro della Repubblica de’ Vineziani, the w ork b y which he is best known to posterity.3 He returned to Florence after the fall of the Medici— he seems to have regarded his absence hitherto as an exile— and during the Great Siege of 1528-1530 held Machiavelli’s old post as secretary to the Ten of W ar and like him was involved in the organization of a civic militia. Expelled from the city in 1530, he suf­ fered the longevity of the exile; and his second major w ork, the Della Repubblica Fiorentina, is an expatriate’s vision of a Florentine popular republic which was never to come into being. The w ork was not even printed until 1721, and though the study of Venice was published in 1540 and had an extensive reputation, we do not study Giannotti as one whose thought greatly affected the mind of his age. He was not a genius, as Machiavelli and Guicciardini both were; but his writings are those of a very intelligent man, in which we see what could be done 3 Felix Gilbert, “The Date of the Composition of Contarini’s and Giannotti’s Books on Venice,” in Studies in the Renaissance, xiv (New York: The Renais­ sance Society of America, 1967), pp. 172-84.

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with Aristotelian, humanist, Venetian, and Machiavellian concepts under significant and revealing circumstances. T h ey further contain some new departures in thought concerning the politics of time. Although Felix Gilbert has assembled evidence connecting Giannotti’s composition of his w ork on Venice with the fall of the Medici in M ay 1527— which he and his friends eagerly anticipated while he was writing his first draft4— it would probably not be inappropriate to consider the Repubblica de’ Vineziani as a fact-finding service which Giannotti intended to perform for his contemporaries. The Venetian model had been endlessly talked about since 1494; there existed a great deal of disseminated information about its workings; but the only w rit­ ten w ork of reference on the structure of Venetian government, that of Marcantonio Sabellico, was in Giannotti’s view so unmethodical as to be uncritical. If the Medici regime were to fall, the popolare optimates among whom he moved must resume their struggle to erect a government in which their leadership would be combined with liberty, and Venice was paradigmatic for such a program. Giannotti therefore set out to inform them of the facts. He envisaged a tripartite study,5 in which one book would outline the general governmental structure (/’amministrazione universale), a second would deal with the various magistracies in detail (panicolarm ente), and a third with la forma e composizione di essa Repubblica— a phrase suggesting theoretical analysis. But he had completed only the first section when revolution did break out at Florence and he returned, to serve under both the moderate regime of N iccolo Capponi and the much more radical gov­ ernment of the Siege, to experience (it may be) a greater degree of commitment to popular government than he anticipated in 1526-1527, and to suffer exile. Lon g afterwards, in 1538, he began preparing (but not revising) his incomplete w ork for the printer.6 He may b y then have completed the manuscript of his blueprint for a popular govern­ ment at Florence; if so, it would be interesting to know w h y he did not publish the latter, but we should know w h y he did not complete the former. His theoretical w ork was done, and had been devoted to a different subject. This being so, we are not to expect too much theoretical structure ±Ibid., pp. 178-79. 5 Donato Giannotti, Opere (3 vols., ed. G . Rosini, Pisa, 1819), 1, 9: “E perche nel primo ragionamento fu disputato deH’amministrazione universale della repub­ blica; nel secondo particolarmente di tutti i magistrati; nel terzo della forma e composizione di essa repubblica, noi dal primo penderemo il principio nostro, non solamente perche naturalmente le cose universali sono di piu facile intelligenza, ma perche ancora del primo ragionamento il secondo, il terzo dall’uno e dall’altro depende.” 6 Gilbert, “Date and Composition,” pp. 180-82. 2 74

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from the essentially incomplete Repubblica de’ Vineziani. T he first section is all that we have, and it suffers from almost the same inade­ quacies as those ascribed to Sabellico; for what his w ork lacked, we are told, was any account of la form a, la composizione, il temperamento di questa Repubblica7— precisely the themes which Giannotti himself was reserving for the third section which he never wrote. Even when it is laid down that the first section will deal with universal topics, leaving particulars to be treated later on, for the reason that universals are easier to understand, this does not mean that the essential principles of the republic’s structure are to be expounded first and their specific applications followed up later; for the defense offered o f this proce­ dure is that painters begin b y sketching in their outlines and sculptors b y roughing out their marble, so that one can see what part of the block is going to be the head before the actual shape emerges. The cose universali are the general characteristics of the natural object which make it fit for the shape or form which it afterward assumes, and this is w h y the geographical site of Venice— itself, of course, an extraordinary phenomenon— is to be described before even the govern­ mental structure.8 In going from universale to particolare, then, we are not traveling from the principle to its application, so much as examin­ ing the matter before w e study its form ; and even then the scholastic image m ay be less appropriate than the artistic, for we are told that each republic is like a natural body, or rather it would be better to say that it is a body produced by nature in the first place and after­ wards polished b y art. W hen nature makes a man, she intends to make a universal whole, a communion. Since each republic is like a natural body, it must have its members; and since there is a propor­ tion and relationship between the members of each body, who knows not this proportion and relationship knows not how the body is made. This is where Sabellico falls short.9 7 Opere, i, 20. s Opere, 1, 34-35: “I dipintori, e scultori, se drittamente riguardiamo, seguitano nello loro arti i precetti dei filosofi; perciocche ancora essi le loro opere dalle cose universali cominciano. I dipintori, prima che particolarmente alcuna imagine dipingano, tirano certe linee, per le quali essa figura universalmente si dimostra; dopo questo le danno la sua particolare perfezione. G li scultori ancora osservano nelle loro statue il medesimo; tanto che chi vedesse alcuno dei loro marmi dirozzato, direbbe piu tosto questa parte debbe servire per la testa, questa per lo braccio, questa la gamba: tanto la natura ci costringe, non solamente nel conoscere ed intendere, ma eziandio nell’operare, a pigliar il principio dalle cose universali! Per questa cagione io incominciai dalla descrizione del sito di Venezia, come cosa piu che l’altre universale.” 9 Opere, 1, 21: “Perciocche ciascuna repubblica e simile ad un corpo naturale, anzi per meglio dire, e un corpo dalla natura principalmente prodotto, dopo

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But if— to simplify the argument a little— nature supplies the matter of a republic and art the form, it follows that the principles of political harmony are not the w ork of nature and cannot be intuitively known; they can only be discovered once we see how the political artist has shaped his material. Sabellico merely described the various magistracies of Venice and did not consider the relationships between them which compose the form of the state. But this is all that Giannotti found time to do; Sabellico’s deficiencies were to be made good only in the third section. W e have not his theoretical analysis of Venetian government, and can only draw conclusions from the language of what we have, and its intimations, as to what that might have been. It is certainly sig­ nificant, for instance, in the light of various doctrines which he was to develop in the book on Florentine government, that Sabellico should be blamed for failure to show how each magistracy is linked with and dependent upon every other, so that the composizione of the republic could be seen in its perfection.10 T he Repubblica de’ Vineziani would not have been a humanist w ork if it had not contained some consideration of the place of the individual in political time. The book is in dialogue form, and the principal speaker— the Venetian scholar Trifone Gabriello or Gabriele— is com­ pared, in his leisurely retirement at Padua, with the Roman Pomponius Atticus. He acknowledges the compliment, but proceeds to draw a distinction. Pomponius Atticus lived when his republic was far gone in corruption, and withdrew into philosophic privacy because he could not save it and was unwilling to perish with it. But Venice is not cor­ rupt, rather more perfect than ever before, and his retirement is that of a man free to choose between action and contemplation.11 The tran­ questo dall’arte limato. Perciocche quando la natura fece l’uomo, ella intese fare una universita, una comunione. Essendo adunque ciascuna repubblica come un’altro corpo naturale, dove ancora i suoi membri avere. E perche tra loro e sempre certa proporzione e convenienza, siccome tra i membri di ciascuno altro corpo, chi non conosce questa proporzione e convenienza, che e tra Fun membro e l’altro, non puo come fatto sia quel corpo comprendere. Ora questo e quello dove manca il Sabellico.” 10 Ibid:. “ . . . non dichiara come l’uno sia collegato con l’altro, che dependenza abbia questo da quello, tal che perfettamente la composizione della repubblica raccoglier se ne possa.” 11 Opere, i, 16-17: “ . . . Pomponio considerando che la repubblica sua era corrottissima, e non conoscendo in se facolta di poterle la sanita restituire, si ritrasse da lei per non essere costretto con essa a rovinare. Perciocche la repubblica, quando e corrotta, e simile al mare agitato dalla tempesta, nel quale chi allora si mette, non si puo a sua porta ritrarre. Io gia non mi son ritratto dalle cure civili per questa cagione, perciocche la mia repubblica non e corrotta, anzi (se io non m’inganno) e piu perfetta ch’ella mai in alcun tempo fosse . . .” 27 6

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quillity of Venice, favorably compared with the m ilitary glory of Rom e,12 is further contrasted with the present miserable state of Italy. T rifone says he does not know whether the present should be com­ pared with the times when the Caesars were destroying Roman liberty, or with those when the barbarians were overrunning Italy; nor does it much matter, since the Caesars were the cause of the barbarian inva­ sions and they in their turn the cause of the present calamities.13 Giannotti’s sense of history is notably causal and linear. Nevertheless it is the happiness of Venice to have escaped history, and this she has clearly done through her success in retaining inner stability and civic virtii. W e look at this point for an account, Aristotelian or Polybian, of how stability may be retained through time by some harmony or mixture of the different elements composing a political society. The language is in many w ays suggestive of such doctrine, and yet, as Gilbert has pointed out, the term “ mixed government” and the apparatus of P oly­ bian thought nowhere appear in the Repubblica de’ Vineziani. T h ey do appear in the Repubblica Fiorentina, and yet we cannot say for certain what principles of composizione and proporzione Giannotti would have educed from the functioning of Venetian magistracies if he had written his third section. So far as our evidence goes, there is no indication that he would have presented Venice as a Polybian balance of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Certainly we are told that the republic consists of a Con­ siglio Grande, a Consiglio de’ Pregati, a Collegio, and a Doge; and of these the first, second, and fourth obviously correspond to the classical many, few , and one, while the Collegio is an executive presidium of serving magistrates which renders more efficient the aristocratic ele­ ment of the pregati. But there is far less indication than there was in 12 Opere, i, 17: “ E quantunque i Romani possedessero tanto maggiore imperio quanto e noto a ciascuno, non pero giudico la repubblica nostra meno beata e felice. Perciocche la felicita d’una repubblica non consiste nella grandezza dell’imperio, ma si ben nel vivere con tranquillita e pace universale. Nella qual cosa se io dicessi che la nostra repubblica fosse alia romana superiore, credo certo che niuno mi potrebbe giustamente riprendere.” 13 Opere, 1, 15: “ . . . due tempi mi pare che tra gli altri siano da ricordare: Uno, nel quale fu il principio della ruina sua [i.e., Italy’s] e dello imperio Romano, e questo fu quando Roma dalle armi Cesariane fu oppressa: l’altro, nel quale fu il colmo del male italiano; e questo fu quando l’ltalia dagli Unni, Goti, Vandali, Longobardi fu discorsa e saccheggiata. E se bene si considerano gli accidenti che da poco tempo in qua, cosi in Oriente come in Occidente, sono avvenuti, agevolmente si puo vedere che a quelli che oggi vivono in Italia soprasta uno di quelli due tempi. Ma quel di loro piu si debba avere in orrore non so io gia discernere: perciocche dal primo si puo dire nascesse il secondo, e dal secondo tutta quella variazione, che ha fatto pigliare al mondo quella faccia, che ancora gli veggiamo a’ tempi nostri, e lasciar del tutto quella che al tempo de’ Romani aveva . . .” 277

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Guicciardini that the four members balance or check one another. W e may suspect that Giannotti would in the end have put forward some such theory, but the fact remains that his study of the Venetian con­ stitutional structure is developed in a double context, that of a histori­ cal account of how Venice came to be a closed aristocracy and that of a detailed investigation of Venetian voting procedures, neither of which has any obvious connection with the principles of Polybian balance. W hen he wrote about Florentine politics, Giannotti as we shall see advocated a vivere popolare; he wished to extend membership in the Consiglio Grande to all who paid taxes, not merely to those whose ancestry qualified them to hold magistracies. H ow far these sympathies were developed when he was writing about Venice in 1525-1527 is not quite clear,14 but there is evidence that he was aware of the problem raised by the law of 1297, which had limited membership in the Vene­ tian Consiglio to the descendants of those who sat in it at that date. In Florence the constitution of 1494, consciously modeled on that of Venice, was almost archetypically the popular constitution because it was based on a Consiglio Grande open to all qualified citizens; so long as there was no such provision as the Venetian law of 1297, there was bound to be tension within this image. Giannotti does not adopt G u ic­ ciardini’s view that Florence is as aristocratic as Venice and Venice as democratic as Florence, since in either case there is a finite citizen body and the terms “ aristocratic” and “ democratic” have meaning only in relation to the distribution of power within that body. He points out, as he is to do again in the case of Florence, that in Venice there are poor, middling, and elite persons, popolari, cittadini, and gentiluomini. The first are those whose callings are too ignoble and whose poverty too great to qualify them for anv kind of civic membership; the sec­ ond are those whose descent and occupations give them standing and wealth enough to rank as sons of the patria; and the third are those who are truly of the city and the state.15 W hen Giannotti writes as a 14 But see 1, 42: . . non e dubbio alcuno che gli uomini, dove eglino non si trovano a trattar cose pubbliche, non solamente non accrescono la nobilta loro, ma perdono ancora quella che hanno e divengono peggio che animali, essendo costretti viver senza alcun pensiero avere che in alto sia levato.” 15 Opere, 1, 35-36: “ . . . per popolari io intendo quelli che altramente possiamo chiamare plebei. E son quelli, i quali esercitano arti vilissime per sostentare la vita loro, e nella citta non hanno grado alcuno. Per cittadini, tutti quelli i quali per essere nati eglino, i padri e gli avoli loro nella citta nostra, e per avere esercitate arti piu onorate, hanno acquistato qualche splendore, e sono saliti in grado tal che ancora essi si possono in un certo modo figluoli di questa patria chiamare. I gentiluomini sono quelli che sono della citta, e di tutto lo stato, di mare o di terra, padroni e signori.” 278

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Florentine advocating popular rule, he wishes to admit the second cate­ g o ry to membership of the Consiglio, if not to magistracy itself;16 but it is the characteristic of Venice that there is a Consiglio Grande, but that the law of 1297 limits it forever to persons in the last and highest grade. Once again, if we had Giannotti’s final reflections upon the gov­ ernment of Venice, we might know how he thought this closed coun­ cil contributed to Venetian stability; but it is noteworthy that in what we have, a first sketch in which the shape of the republic is roughed out (dirozzato),17 the dialogue takes the form of a discussion of the history of the Venetian Consiglio and of the cause (cagione) and occa­ sion (occasione) 18 o f each form which it has assumed. It is noteworthy also that, though to a humanist writing history the cause of political innovation would normally be the perception b y reform ing legislators of some principle on which government should be modeled, Giannotti is unwilling to go too far in ascribing such perceptions to the ancestral Venetians; a caution which reveals a number of things about the prob­ lems which Venice presented to the political intellect. In Venetian constitutional history he sees two critical moments: one occurring about 1170, when a Consiglio Grande was established, the other in 1297, when its membership was closed.19 Both are moments in the institutionalization of a citizen body on a footing of proportion­ ate equality among its increasingly finite membership. T h e Venetians constitute a civic aristocracy, and it is the characteristic of such an aristocracy— w e know by now that it was hard to define the civic ethos in other than aristocratic terms— that its members pursue glory (Gian­ notti’s term is chiarezza) in the public service. In this w ay individuals become renowned and their families preserve the memory of their deeds. This, Trifon e explains, is w h y we know relatively little of Vene­ tian history before 1170. Since there was no Consiglio, there was no institutionalized pursuit of chiarezza; there were no families constituted b y the chiarezza of their ancestors and impelled to preserve records of past deeds and lineal continuities. The condition of Venice was not unlike that of Rom e under the kings; in both cases only the advent of a civic aristocracy led to the institution of historic memory, and in the case of Venice it m ay be added that the term gentiluom o, before 1170, probably meant only what it means in other cities— an individual out­ standing for his birth or for some other reason— and had not the pre­ cise civic and political significance it acquired with the development of the Consiglio.20 16 See below, nn. 93-95; cf. Guicciardini in 1512, above, ch. v, n. 29. 17 E.g., p. 50. 18 E.g., p. 77. 19 Opere, 1, 42-43. 20 Opere, 1, 61-62, 63-64: “ Ma poscia che il consiglio fu ordinato, e che l’autorita de’ dogi fu co’ magistrati e coi consigli temperata, allora i cittadini, adoperandosi 279

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Giannotti is grappling with several problems in Venetian studies. One is the general paucity of historical information, and the circum­ stance that more is preserved in private archives than in public chroni­ cles. Another is a problem of considerable importance in constitutional theory, already familiar to us from Machiavelli’s Discorsi: since Venice claimed no hero-legislator and retained the memory of no great politi­ cal crisis, it was difficult to explain how a citizen body could have per­ fected itself, especially since Giannotti does not spend much time on the possibility that the whole apparatus o f perfection had existed since the beginning. W hen his interlocutors discuss the innovation of 1 1 70, they face the question of how the Venetians could have thought of organizing themselves into a Consiglio Grande, seeing that no such institution existed anywhere in the world at that time. V e ry few men, they agree, are capable of political invention, and citizen bodies never approve proposals which have not been tested b y experience, either their own or that of others. Innovation is almost always imitation; even Romulus is said to have borrowed from the Greeks, and Florence, after imitating the Venetian Consiglio in 1494 and the perpetual Dogeship in 1502, might have been saved from disaster if she had imitated what goes with them. It would therefore have been a miracle (cosa miracolosa) if the Venetians of 117 0 had been able to excogitate the form of a Consiglio Grande without imitating it from somebody else, since it is this which has not only kept them free but raised them to unparal­ leled heights of grandeur. But we need not suppose that any such mira­ cle occurred. Apart from a few hints in the scanty historical materials, it is reasonable to believe that some sort of Council was maintained by the Doges before 1170 , so that those are right who maintain that the Council is of highest antiquity, so long as they do not mean the Con­ siglio Grande as established in that year.21 In a passage faintly recalling nelle faccende, acquistarono gloria e riputazione. Ed e accaduto alia nostra citta quel medesimo che avenne a Roma. . . . E da questo, credo, che nasca che noi non abbiamo molta notizia dell’antichita delle famiglie de’ gentiluomini innanzi a Sebastiano Ziani . . . e . . . che in tutte le nostre memorie non trovo menzione alcuna di questo nome gentiluomo, eccetto che nella vita di Pietro Ziani doge XLII, figliuolo del sopradetto Sebastiano. “ . . . e non credo che questo nome gentiluomo significasse quello che oggi significa . . . ma che . . . s’intendesse quello che oggi nell’altre citta significa, cioe chiunque o per antichita, o per ricchezze o per autorita piu che gli altri risplende.” 21 Opere, 1, 66-68: “ Ma quello che piu mi stringe e che gran cosa saria stata, che i nostri maggiori senza esempio alcuno avessero trovato si bell’ordine, si bel modo di distribuire i carichi e le onoranze della citta, cioe il gran consiglio. Perciocche egli non e dubbio alcuno che quando questo consiglio fu trovato, non era simile forma di vivere in luogo alcuno di mondo, di che s’abbia notizia. E le cose, le quali senza esempio alcuno s’hanno ad introdurre, hanno sempre tante difficolta, 280

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Machiavelli’s views on early Roman history, Giannotti suggests that reformers in 1 170, wishing to strip the Doge of certain powers, resolved to transfer them to the Council, but realizing that there would be dan­ gers and tensions if they were conferred upon a few , decided to trans­ fer them to the citizens as a whole (while retaining a special degree of authority for themselves) and devised an annually elected Consiglio Grande to be truly representative of the whole.22 N o miraculous legis­ lator is thus called for; Venetian history proceeds through pragmatic reflection on past experience and, far from hitting upon some miracu­ lous recombination of elements, m erely displays in 117 0 a political sagacity exceeding that of the Roman patricians after the expulsion of the kings. In the civic humanist perspective, a Consiglio Grande— whether Venetian or Florentine— was the foundation of all liberta in a vivere civile, because it brought together all citizens, on a footing of equality, in a competition for office and in virtu. Its appearance at Venice, then, could not as we have seen be left unexplained. But the closing of the Venetian Consiglio in 1297, so that membership became hereditary and new gentiluomini were next to never created, was a phenomenon of a different order. Giannotti writes that nothing can be learned of it from publicly commissioned histories, so that if one did not read the private records of noble houses one would remain almost w holly ignorant; and even in these sources nothing whatever is known about the cagione or the occasione of that law. From experience and history one recog­ nizes that changes on this scale do not occur unless there has been some major em ergency; but he has been unable to find out what this was, and he specifically says that he can see no imperfection in the Consiglio che come impossibiie sono le piu volte abbandonate. II che nasce perche gli uomini nel azioni umane non approvano quegli ordini, l’utilita de’ quali non hanno ne per la propria, ne per l’altrui esperienza, conosciuta; e pochissimi sono sempre stati e sono quelli che sappiamo cose nuove trovare e persuaderle. E percio nelle innovazioni degli ordini si vanno imitando i vecchi cosi proprii come gli altrui. . . . Saria stata adunque cosa miracolosa, che i nostri maggiori senza averne esempio alcuno, avessero, nel riordinare la nostra repubblica, saputo trovare ed intro­ d u ce si bella, si civile, si utile ordinazione come e questa del gran consiglio, la quale senza dubbio e quella che non ha solamente mantenuto libera la nostra patria, ma eziandio, procedendo di bene in meglio, l’ha fatta salire in quella grandezza d’imperio e riputazione, alia quale voi essere pervenuta la vedete. £ adunque credibile per le due dette ragioni, oltre a quelle poche memorie che ce ne sono, che innanzi a Sebastiano Ziani fosse qualche forma di consiglio. . . . Quegli adunque i quali dicono che il consiglio e antichissimo, se non intendo quel con­ siglio che s’ordino per distribuire i magistrati, forse non s’ingannano; ma se intendono questo altro, senza dubbio sono in errore.” 22 Opere, 1, 72-74. 2 81

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as established in 1 1 70 which could have necessitated the variazione of 1297. ft 1S possible, as he has earlier suggested, that all natives o f good fam ily were b y now included in the Consiglio and that the closure was applied in order to keep out foreign merchants and preserve purity of lineage. But all this is mere conjecture, and nothing is known for certain.23 It seems clear that Giannotti had encountered a double diffi­ culty. He had really been unable to find any traditional or historical account of the closing of the Council; and, no less significantly, he could not deal with it by supposing that civic experience had led to the discovery of some political principle, because he could not imagine any principle which it exemplified. His attitude toward the closure is not free from ambiguity. W hen he first discusses it he asserts that Venetian chiarezza mounted higher than ever after 1297, and that few families of note already resident in Venice were excluded from power b y the change; but in his subsequent treatment, while insisting that it was a change for the better, he concedes that some were excluded and embittered and allows the suggestion to be made that these declined in nobility and vanished from the historic record in consequence of their exclusion. Possibly the last word may be found in something that he writes in another context— admittedly with reference to a particolarita of much less importance than the great measure of 1297: You are to understand that in every republic there are many institu­ tions (costituzioni) for which one can give no probable reason, let alone the true one. And this is to be found not only in those cities where the form of government has changed, but in those which have long been ruled and governed by the same laws. For although the usages have been kept up, their causes are none the less lost in antiquity.24 23 Opere, 1, 77: “ . . . dico che io nell’antiche nostre memorie non ho trovato mai che si fossa cagione di far serrare il consiglio; come voi dite, non par da credere che un or dine tan to nuovo potesse nascere senza qualche grande occasione. Di che noi potremmo addurre infiniti esempii, non solamente di quelle repubbliche che hanno variato in meglio, tra le quali e la nostra, siccome io stimo, ma di quelle che sono in peggio trascorse. Ma le variazioni della nostra repubblica medesima, se bene le considerate, vi possono dare di quello che diciamo certissima testimonianza. Nondimeno io non ho letto mai, ne inteso, che cagione e che occasione facesse il consiglio serrare. N e da me stesso posso pensare che da quella forma del consiglio potesse nascere disordine alcuno, che avesse ad essere cagione della sua variazione; tanto che io credo che coloro che furono autori di tal mutazione . . . vedendo nella citta nostra concorrere quantita grandissima di forestieri per conto di faccende mercantili. . . . Ma questa e tutta congettura; perciocche, come ho detto, non ne ho certezza alcuna.” 24 Opere, 1, 116: “Ed avete ad intendere che in ogni repubblica sono assai costi­ tuzioni, delle quali non si puo assegnare alcuna probabile non che vera ragione. E questo non solamente avviene in quelle citta che hanno il loro governo variato, 282

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There are political phenomena which usage may justify, but cannot explain. If we know neither the occasion, the cause nor the principle on which the Council was closed in 1297, that measure is dangerously close to being one of them. Giannotti’s Venice, then, does not seem to have effected her escape from history through the divine intelligence of the legislator, or through achieving some Polybian or even Aristotelian combination of principles. If we now ask what are the salient features of Venetian government as he roughs them out in this initial sketch, the answer seems to emerge in two ways. In the first place there is what Gian­ notti’s introductory remarks have prepared us to encounter: a descrip­ tion of the various councils and officers making up the Venetian pyra­ mid, which ought at least to prepare the w ay for the never-written account of how they are linked together to compose la forma di essa Repubblica. It is a safe assumption that this account would have dealt both with the distribution of functions among the various magistracies and with the w ays in which the Doge, the Collegio, and the Pregati came to be elected; for it was a characteristic of Aristotelian political science that the functions performed b y public officials were not dif­ ferentiated from the function of electing those officials, and that mem­ bership in the ekklesia or consiglio where magistrates were chosen was considered in itself a species of magistracy. This point is borne out when Giannotti, like Guicciardini a few years earlier, enumerates in more or less classic terms the principal powers of government. “ It is said that there are four things which constitute the directive force (il nervo) of every republic: the creation of magistrates, the determina­ tion of peace and war, the making of laws and the hearing of appeals.” 25 Magistracies, or forms of power, are rendered interdependent by the w ays in which they share these four modes of authority; but in that case the election of magistrates must itself be a kind of magistracy and enter into the complex distributions of authority. W hat rendered both Florence and Venice, in the eyes of both Giannotti and Guicciar­ dini, governments of the popolo and of liberta, was the fact that in both (at least during Florence’s republican interludes) there existed a Consiglio Grande in which all magistracies were distributed. The fur­ ther problem, at least to minds trained on Aristotelian and humanist presumptions, was whether the Consiglio, as the assembly of all citizens, ma in quelle ancora le quali con le medesime leggi si sono lungo tempo rette e governate. Perciocche quantunque l’usanze si siano mantenute, nondimeno le cagioni di quelle sono dall’antichita oscurate.” 25 Opere, 1, 51: “Dicono adunque che quattro sono le cose nelle quali consiste il nervo d’ogni repubblica. La creazione de’ magistrati; le deliberazioni della pace e della guerra; le introduzione delle leggi; e le provocazioni.” Cf. p. 86.

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should have any other function than that of election. On the one hand it was possible, though as we know not very easy, to attribute to undif­ ferentiated citizens species of intelligence which rendered them capable of other forms of decision. On the other it was possible to deny them any independent intelligence, to suppose that any specific type of deci­ sion needed a corresponding elite group or “ few ” to take it, and to reduce the role of the Consiglio Grande to that of ensuring that the election of these elite groups, which may now be termed “ magis­ tracies,” took place under conditions of equality and impersonality. T h e latter we have seen to be the thrust of Guicciardini’s argument; Giannotti, when writing some years later about Florentine government as one committed to some kind of popular supremacy, had to decide whether control of elections was a sufficient guarantee of this, or whether the Consiglio Grande must intervene also, to some degree, in the exercise of the other three powers making up the nervo della repubblica. But when he wrote his description of Venice such problems did not demand his attention. The limited size of the Venetian citizen body precluded any division into ottimati and popolo, and he was able to ignore what would in a Florentine context have been the strongly elit­ ist implications of the circumstance that the Consiglio discharged no functions other than the electoral, none at least that need detain his readers. In observing that new legislative proposals are dealt with by the Pregati, he remarks quite casually that some laws are also laid before the Consiglio Grande for its approval, if the initiating magis­ trate thinks they need the maggior riputazione which this brings.26 Focussing his attention exclusively on the electoral organization of the Venetian Consiglio, he is able to deal at length27 with a major constitu­ ent of the “ m yth of V enice” of which we have so far said little: the complex and fascinating routinization of nominating, voting and ballotting which visitors to the republic delighted to observe and describe. B y a series of physical devices— the benches on which men took their seats at random, but rose up in a fixed order to cast their votes; the containers from which names and numbers were drawn at random, but in which positive or negative votes might be placed in secrecy— the Venetians were held, so to speak, to have mechanized virtu. That is, they had blended the elements of chance and choice in such a w ay as 26 Opere, i, 125-26: “ Usano ancora i nostri fare confermare alcune leggi non solamente nel consiglio dei pregati, ma ancora nel grande; la qual cosa, credo che sia in potesta di quel magistrato che principalmente le introduce. E credo che questo s’usi fare, accioche a questo modo s’acquisti a quella legge maggior riputazione . . .” 27 Opere, 1 , 9 1 - 1 1 7 . 284

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to present each voter with a clear set of alternatives, and to liberate him from every pressure and every temptation which might cause him to vote to please somebody else instead of stating his rational choice of the better candidate. If one thought o f virtu, as one might, as the taking of decisions directed at the public good, and if one thought of the sala del consiglio grande as an enormous physical device for elimi­ nating extraneous pressures and ensuring— almost enforcing— rational­ ity in choosing for the public good, then one thought of Venetian government in a w ay for which such a phrase as “ the mechanization of v ir t u ” though anachronistic, is not inappropriate. N o less than the image of a Polybian perfection of equilibrium, the belief that the Vene­ tians had achieved this was a potent element of the mito di Venezia. Giannotti’s account of Venetian voting procedures was the first written and printed b y a Florentine for Florentines, but their general nature had of course been known at Florence for a long time.28 G u ic­ ciardini, we recall, did not believe in their efficacy; private interests and relationships could not be eliminated from what electors did in secret, and it would be better to have them declare their choices in public where their fellow-citizens could observe and respond to what they were doing. Mechanized secrecy of choice, in his view, was at once too oligarchic and not elitist enough. Guicciardini’s criticism car­ ries the very important implication that decision and virtu, in the last analysis, exist in the web of interactions between men; that what mat­ ters is less the rationality with which I choose what is for the public good than the concern for that good which I communicate to others in the act of choosing; and James Harrington, who admired the Vene­ tian system, was to admit the force of the criticism that in these routinized and ritualized procedures, men did not learn to know each other.29 In a secret ballot, each man chooses between alternatives that have been found for him and, even if his choice can be made perfectly rational, he does not have opportunity to declare his reasons to his fel­ lows. If the Venetian Consiglio did nothing but choose magistrates and officers in this w ay, it would represent an extreme development of the principle that the many had no function but to ensure equality and impersonality in the choice of the governing elites. Giannotti does not comment on these problems, but it is possible to see from his subsequent 28 Gilbert, “Venetian Constitution,” pp. 463-500 (above, ch. iv, n. 26). 29 See the speech of Epimonus de Garrula in Oceana (Works, ed. Toland, 1771; p. no): “The truth is, they have nothing to say to their acquaintance; or men that are in council sure would have tongues; for a council, and not a word spoken in it, is a contradiction. . . . But in the parliament of Oceana, you had no balls or dancing, but sober conversation; a man might know and be known, shows his parts and improve ’em.” 285

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writings that Venetian procedures reinforced in his mind the idea of a political activity which consisted purely in a silent and rational choice between alternatives found and presented b y others. T o understand the full range of his political thought, one must turn to those works in which he applied Venetian and other ideas to the problem of devising a popular government for Florence.

[i i ] W e have two short treatises which he wrote during the period of the last Florentine republic and the Great Siege (15 2 7 -15 30 ). T he first of these is a discorso on reordering the government, of familiar type, which, according to an appended letter of later date, Giannotti wrote at the request of the Gonfaloniere N iccolo Capponi, shortly before he fell from power and was replaced by a more radical ruling group. Assuming that this Letter to Capponi30 retains the original text and was not revised in the light of later experience, Giannotti’s thinking at this time (say late 1528) was so m arkedly aristocratic in character that it is hard to distinguish from that of Guicciardini’s D ialogo, and Felix Gilbert has defined it as typical of the liberal ottimati who wanted to maintain elite rule within a popular system. Giannotti begins b y laying down that the citizens of any republic are of diverse natures, and that the aspirations of all must be satisfied if the republic is to survive (an Aristotelian maxim). There are those who desire only liberty, and these are the many; there are those who seek that honor (onore) which is the reward of greater prudence (prudenza) , and these are few er; and there are those who seek the highest position of all, which can be enjoyed by only one man at a time. This variant of the traditional onefew-m any differentiation was something of a Florentine cliche; G u ic­ ciardini, Machiavelli, and Lodovico Alamanni had used it already; but it was not a formula which had been found necessary b y the student of Venetian affairs. There the citizen body was so homogeneous that it could be treated as consisting of equals; but in the sharply divided city of Florence, where an elite and a non-elite confronted each other (so it was thought) within the citizen body, it was far more necessary to categorize the different types of citizen and plan a mixed govern­ ment as a combination of the one, few and many which the categories employed inevitably suggested. Though Giannotti does not use the language of governo misto when writing directly about Venice, the city begins to appear in that light as soon as its principles and methods are applied to the ordering of Florence. 30 Discorso al . . . Gonfaloniere . . . Niccolo Capponi sopra i modi di ordinare la Repubblica Fiorentina; Opere, 111, 27-48. 286

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The Consiglio Grande had been restored as soon as the Medici col­ lapsed in 1527, and Gilbert presents Giannotti’s discorso as one of a number of proposals to lessen its power in favor of the optimate c e rc h io 31 So no doubt it is, but we should observe that Giannotti’s criticisms of the existing system are directed at its over-narrow and over-restrictive character. The Gonfaloniere has too much influence over the Signoria; the Ten of W ar (to whom he was secretary) have too much power in matters of peace and war, and their procedure is so disorderly that decisions are often made b y one or two men. All this is strettissimo and violento. Like the Guicciardini of the Dialogo, Gian­ notti argued that aristocratic leadership could function only on a foot­ ing of equality among aristocrats, and that this could be secured only b y a regime of liberta, guaranteed by a Consiglio Grande. His threefold classification of citizens necessitated a four-step pyramid of govern­ ment, exactly follow ing that he had observed in Venice. Th e many who desired liberty were to be represented (the term is in the original Italian) b y a Consiglio Grande; the few who pursued onore b y a sen­ ate elected for life. T he role of the One was obviously to be played by a Gonfaloniere a vita, but since there would always be more than one seeking the supreme glory which could form ally be vested in only one man at a time, he was to be assisted b y a council of procuratori, like the collegio at Venice, consisting of the most experienced magis­ trates of all, sharing his preeminence and aspiring legitimately to his office should it fall vacant. Though election to the senate, the procura­ tori and the gonfalonierate was to be for life, the essence of liberta was to be retained b y keeping all elections in the hands of the Consiglio. In this w ay, competition for elite membership was to be open, and men would ow e their preeminence to public and not private favor. Gian­ notti no doubt assumed that there would be a sufficient turnover through death to satisfy the aspirations of the young to office. It appears at this stage that the Consiglio Grande has been confined to the single function of preserving liberty through rendering public and political the emergence of elites. But Giannotti introduces the fur­ ther principle that every public action is divisible into three phases, which he calls consultazione, deliberazione, and esecuzione 32 If we place the first tw o beside Guicciardini’s deliberazione and approvazione, some apparent confusion may arise; but the distinction being drawn in either case is that between the activity of proposing alterna­ tive courses of action and the activity of choosing between such alter­ natives. W e know that it had already been used b y Guicciardini, and it might have been suggested b y many, though it corresponds exactly 31 Gilbert, “ Venetian Constitution,” p. 498 and n.

32 Opere , 111, 32-33. 287

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with none, of the distinctions between different modes of political activity drawn in Aristotle’s Politics. In a Renaissance setting, it must necessarily have to do with the distinctions which the age observed between different modes of political understanding; and Giannotti pro­ ceeds to say that consultazione must be left to the few , since only a few possess the faculty of invention (invenzione) and these do not need the counsel o f others33 (though presumably they take counsel among themselves). T o Florentines interested in Venetian procedures, the idea of a silent, routinized, rational choice implicit in the mechanisms of the ballot might well have heightened the sense of a distinction between invention and selection; but when Giannotti proceeds to lodge deliberazione in the many, it is characteristic of the w ay Florentine thought seems to have been developing that he says nothing about the intellec­ tual or moral faculties which render the many capable of choosing where they cannot initiate. The reason w h y they should have this function is that if the few choose, or if consultazione and deliberazione are in the same hands, the temptations of power will pervert their rea­ son; their choice w ill be determined b y private ambitions, and in con­ sequence consultazione will be exercised not by the few qualified, but b y the even few er ambitious. Here, once again, we are looking at the origins of the doctrine of the separation of powers, and it should be observed both how far these origins lay in the fear of corruption, and how little a role was played by any clear theory of a democratic mode of understanding. If consultazione is left to the few , rationality is assured; if delibera­ zione is left to the many, “ liberty will be secured, and those who have authority will have it b y virtue (virtii) of the republic and not through their own presumption and importunity.” 34 Execution may be left to the few , and it is not unfitting that those who proposed a policy should have responsibility for carrying it out. But as we examine what Gian­ notti is saying on these matters, we make two further discoveries. The first is that the composition of a public action by consultazione, deli­ berazione and esecuzione is depicted as occurring primarily within the senate, which is the organ of the few and rappresenta lo stato degli ottimati. W hen we read that deliberazione is carried out “ by the many, that is, by the senate,” 35 w e realize that the few in this case are 33 hi, 32: “Tutti quelli che consigliano e necessario che sieno valenti, e di quel primo ordine, che scrive Esiodo, nel quale sono connumerati quelli che hanno invenzione per loro medesimi, e non hanno bisogno di consiglio d’altri.” 34 h i , 41: “II consiglio saria in pochi, cioe nei valenti; la deliberazione in molti; e percio la liberta saria sicura, e quelli che avrebbero la autorita, l’avrebbero per virtu della repubblica, e non per loro presunzione e importunita.” 35 lbid.\ “ . . . essendo le cose determinate da molti, cioe dal senato . . .” 288

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the procuratori or the T en of W ar, and that the numerical few-m any distinction does not after all coincide with the qualitative distinction between the many who seek liberty through the Consiglio and the few who seek honor through the senate; it is internal to the latter. But we next discover a further reason for this. The analysis of action has so far been conducted solely with reference to the determination of ques­ tions of peace and war, which Giannotti like Guicciardini regarded as the most important single function of government once internal liberty was secured (if it was not more important even than that). These questions were to go no further than the senate. W hen he deals with the procuratori as initiators of new legislation,36 however, Gian­ notti makes it clear that the final deliberazione must take place in the Consiglio Grande. He makes more specific provision for this than he had described as existing in Venice, and the reason m ay well have been the acute awareness possessed by Florentines that a new law could eas­ ily affect the distribution of political pow er— a thing assumed not to occur at Venice. But the legislative power ranks in importance after the power of peace and war, and the feeling that the latter was a matter of prudenza, and prudenza the characteristic of the few ,37 was to drag Giannotti’s thought in an aristocratic direction even after he was much more openly committed to popular government than he was when he wrote the Letter to Capponi. It was probably the siege of 1528-1530 that brought about an undeni­ able change in Giannotti’s thinking. A fter the fall of Capponi he remained in Florence to the end and seems, not unlike Guicciardini, to have had ambivalent feelings toward the radical leaders, at once con­ demning their recklessness and admiring their courage. He had no good opinion of their Savonarolan religiosity or o f the w ay they conducted the government of the city, but even before Capponi’s removal from the scene, the defense of Florence was raising a political issue which m ay have formed the bridge between Giannotti’s earlier philoVenetian and his later popolare writings. This was the question of the militia. Machiavelli and Guicciardini had agreed in contrasting Venice, as an aristocratic citta disarmata, with Rom e as an armed, popular, turbulent, and expanding state; and in the Repubblica de’ Veneziani Giannotti had allowed Trifone to contrast Roman m ilitary glory with Venetian peace and stability, to the latter’s apparent advantage. N ever­ theless, there was the militia tradition at Florence; there were Machia36 Opere, 111, 30: “ Vorrei dare a costori una cura speciale di considerar sempre le cose della citta, e i primi pensieri d’introdurre nuove leggi e correggere le vecchie, secondo che ricerca la varieta de’ tempi.” 37 Opere, 111, 28: the ottimati are “quelli che il piu delle volte hanno prudenza, il premio della quale pare che sia l’onore come testimonio d’essa.” 289

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velli’s writings, with which Giannotti was acquainted; and before as well as after Capponi’s overthrow, the republic set about organizing a militia which was held to have performed great deeds during the siege and became part of the legend cherished b y Giannotti and other exiles in subsequent years. As secretary to the Ten, he was involved in organizing this force, and we have a discorso on the subject which is accepted as his w ork and seems to belong to the latter part of 1528.38 It forms part of a substantial contemporary literature of the revived militia, with which it should be read; but in the context of Giannotti’s own thinking, it can be seen w orking a change. Giannotti opens b y refuting various arguments against the establish­ ment of a militia, the chief of which is that arms are contrary to the nature of the Florentines, since this has been so long formed b y mer­ cantile pursuits that it will be too difficult to accustom them to mili­ tary exercises.39 His reply is an appeal from second to first nature: there is an absolute necessity for the city to be armed, since it is the nature of every creature to defend itself and a city must not lack the virtii which is given it in order to do so.40 The fact that some men never develop their intellect does not alter the fact that men are endowed with intellect b y nature; and as for the argument that the Florentines have grow n used to other pursuits, this can be dealt with b y saying that since use (assuefazione) is so mighty a power that it can operate even against nature, it can do even more when operating with nature on its side.41 The revival of the militia, then, will restore the Florentines to what they are by the universal nature of all men, and this is a sufficient refutation of those who see it as somehow incom­ patible with civic life. If it is natural to men to bear arms, Giannotti means, and if it is natural to them to follow citizenship, there can be no incongruency between the two, and this is much more than a for38 Archivio Storico ltaliano (hereafter A .S.I.), ser. 5, vol. 8 (1891), G . R. Sanesi (ed.), “ Un discorso sconosciuto di Donato Giannotti intorno alia milizia,” pp.

2"27‘

39 Ibid., p. 14: “ . . . non tanto perche da natura non hanno questa inclinazione, quanto perche, essendo la citta lungo tempo vivuta tra gli esercizii mercantili, difficilmente si potria assuefare a uno esercizio tanto diverso e contrario.” 40 Ibid.: “ . . . dico che assolutamente la citta si debbe armare: perche lo essere disarmato repugnia alia natura, ed alia autorita di tutti quelli che hanno trattato delli governi delle citta. Repugnia alia natura, perche noi vediamo in ogni uomo particulare, essere d’appetito naturale di potersi difendere; ed a qualunche non sopliscano le forze di poterlo fare, pare che sia imperfetto, per mancare di quella virtu: la quale e ordinata dalla natura per conservazione di se stesso.” 41 Ibid., p. 16: “E chi dicie che lo essersi assuefatto ad altri esercizii impediscie tale ordinazione, si inganna interamente: perche, essendo di tanta forza la assue­ fazione, che ella puote operare contro alia natura, tanto piu facilmente potra in una cosa che e secondo la natura, cioe l’esercizio delle armi.” 290

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mai reconciliation: Giannotti goes on to argue that the militia is a powerful, indeed an indispensable, socializing, and politicizing agency. M ilitary service makes men equal, in the sense that all who serve are equally subject to the public authority, and the private loyalties and affiliations which m ay disfigure and corrupt civic life have no place there and are eliminated.42 Because men in arms defend the same things without distinction, they come to have the same values; because they are all disciplined to accept the same authority, they are all obedient to the res publics, because the public authority monopolizes force, there can be no subjection of one private citizen to another, so that liberty and authority are strengthened and guaranteed simultaneously. But there is a dynamic involved in the view that the militia makes men citizens, as the m ilitary discipline imposed b y Romulus made Romans out of a random collection of bandits;43 it is that the more men we arm, the more citizens we must make. The inhabitants of Florence, Giannotti proceeds, are of three kinds: those capable of membership in the Consiglio, those capable only of paying taxes and those capable of neither. He now states the case for enrolling the sec­ ond category in the militia as well as the first. T he beneflciati— as in his later writings he calls the first class— are too few in numbers; the second class have the same material and emotional interests (father­ land, property, and families) as the first, and must be given the same opportunity to defend them. Once you give some men the right to defend their property with their own persons, to deny it to others who have the same property is to render them worse than slaves; the city would become a collection of masters and servants, and the latter would be lower than the dwellers in the subject cities and the countryside.44 T o leave them unarmed would divide the city, to arm 42 Ibid., p. 17: “ Ma vuol dire regolare gli uomini, e rendergli atti al potere difendere la patria da gli assalti esterni e dalle alterazioni intrinseche, e porre freno a’ licenziosi: li quali e necessario che ancora essi si regolino, vedendo per virtu della ordinanza ridotti gli uomini alia equalita, ne essere autorita in per­ sona, fuori che in quelli a chi e dato dalle leggi. . . . Non e adunque da omettere di introdurre tale ordinanza: la quale, oltre alle predette cose, toglie ogni autorita a chi per ambizione estraordinariamente cercassi riputazione; perche, sapiendo ciascuno chi egli abbia a ubbidire, non si puo destinare alia ubbidientia di persona.” 43 Ibid., p. 20: “ . . . Romulo, il quale messe l’ordinanza in quella sua turba sciellerata ed assuefatta a ogni male: il che poi che ebbe fatto, tutti quelli uomini diventorno buoni; e quello furore che usavano nel male operare, lo convertirono in far bene.” Note how arms serve to convert habit, and how virtu is a reversed furore. 44 Ibid., p. 18: “ Sono alcuni che dicono che le armi non si dovriano dare se non a quelli che sono abili al consiglio, dubitando se elle si dessino a quelli altri che sono a graveza, essendo maggior numero, non rovinassino lo stato. Chi seguitassi 291

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them would unite it. Giannotti goes on from this point to state the case against excluding from the militia those suspected of collaboration with the Medici, and argues that to give them arms will be to reunite them with the city of which they are members. He does not put it into words at this stage, but it is clear that arms and a full equipment of civic rights are inseparable: on the one hand, to deny men arms which are allowed to others is an intolerable denial of freedom; on the other, those who bear arms in the militia become morally capable of a citizen­ ship which it would be equally impossible to deny them. In the R epu b ­ blica Fiorentina, written a few years later, he followed a similar logic and contended that membership in the Consiglio Grande should be conceded to all who paid taxes, whether their ancestors had held mag­ istracies or not. W e have returned to the point where it is seen that the armed state must be the popular state. Machiavelli had opted for Rom e and against Venice on these grounds, and there is one moment in Giannotti’s V ene­ tian dialogue where the Florentine interlocutor asks how many men in Venice there are capable of bearing arms and how many gentiluo­ mini enjoying the rights of citizenship.45 The answer reveals a dispro­ portion of 40,000 to 3,000, but no comment is made either on the mean­ ing of this for Venetian political stability or on V enice’s reliance on mercenary soldiers. In general, the case for the restricted size of the Venetian citizen body must rest on the assumption that those who are not gentiluomini are either resident aliens or plebeians of too base a calling to rank as political animals at all; neither claim could be made in the case of Florence. Even more than Machiavelli, Giannotti was driven b y Florentine realities toward the ideal of the armed popular state, and he specifically applies the idea to Florentine conditions in a w ay that Machiavelli’s Discorsi do not. W e know from the Repubblica Fiorentina that he recognized Machiavelli as an authority on the mili­ tary and civic role of the militia, but it should be observed that the theory set forth in the militia discourse of 1528 is much more overtly Aristotelian than is Machiavelli’s. It is natural to man to defend his own, and it is natural to him to pursue common goods in citizenship. tale oppinione, primamente armerebbe poco numero di uomini, e lasciando gli altri, che sono a graveza, disarmati, saria necessario che restassino mai contenti, e conseguentemente nimici della repubblica; talche quelli pochi che sarebbono armati, a poco altro servirebbono che a guardia dello stato contro a quelli, che rimanessino disarmati. . . . A ’ quali se si togliessi anche il potere difendere le cose sue con la persona propria, sarebbano peggio che stiavi; di modo che la citta sarebbe uno agregato di padroni e servi; e sarebbano in peggiore grado, che i sud­ diti e contadini.” 45 Opere, 1, 45-46. 292

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T o restore him his power to do the former contributes to the restora­ tion o f his power to do the latter; both restorations constitute riformazione in the Aristotelian sense, the return of man to his prime nature. This is w h y militia service is an agency transforming men into citizens. There was another dimension which thought on this subject could easily assume. In Giannotti’s proposals for organizing the militia there is provision for a solemn ceremony on the feast-day of San Giovanni, at which the citizens in arms, mustered b y their officers, shall hear mass, take an oath of obedience at the altar, and listen to an oration making clear the religious as well as civic meaning of their duties.40 Such cere­ monies were actually held, and we have the texts o f several orations delivered to the militia by figures of the post-Capponi regime.47 All of them strike a note essentially Savonarolan, in the sense that the Aris­ totelian idea of a riformazione of man as citizen is extended into the sphere of personal holiness and proclaimed with religious exaltation as a rinnovazione. Florence has been chosen b y G od to restore liberta,48 and to exhibit men living socially according to the values of Christian­ ity; uvivere a popolo,” says one of them, unon e altro che vivere da cristianoT49 Since militia service teaches men to be citizens,50 it is part of this process of eschatological restoration; it is itself holy and miracu­ lous, and arms are more than once spoken o f as a “ garment” — sacratissima veste, incorruttibile veste deW arme .51 T he idea that the citizenin-arms dedicates himself to the public good is of course dominant, and he is many times told w h y he should not fear death in doing so; but 46 A.S.I. (1891), pp. 26-27. 47 A .S ./., vol. 15 (18 51), “Documenti per servire alia storia della Milizia Italiana . . . raccolti . . . e preceduti da un discorso di Giuseppe Canestrini,” pp. 342-76 (orations of Luigi Alamanni and Pier Filippo Pandolfini); R . von Albertini, op.cit., pp. 404-11 (oration of Piero Vettori). AJS.L (18 51), p. 355 (Pandolfini): . . questa liberta non e opera umana, tanti anno sono che la fu predetta, et vedesi nata et data a questo popolo miracolosamente . . .” 49 Ibid., p. 356. 50 Ibid., p. 354: “Chi exaerita il corpo, lo dispone ad ubbidire al consiglio, e fa l’appetito obbediente alia ragione; et cosi l’uomo diventa facile a sopportare il dolore, et disporsi a disprezzare la morte. L ’obbedienza e necessaria in ogni cosa, et maxime in una republica. A buon cittadino niente piu si conviene, che sapere comandare et ubbidire.” 51 Ibid., p. 345 (Alamanni): “ . . . et allor tutti insieme parimente si vestiron l’arme, et dieron forma a questa militar disciplina; alia quale oggi noi, dalla divina grazia illuminati, darem principio . . .” P. 347: “Nessuno sia, non volendo offendere Dio, le leggi, la liberta et se medesimo, che si cinga questa sacratissima veste dell’arme con altra privata speranza che con quella di salvare la sua patria et i suoi cittadini.” Albertini, p. 409: “ . . . per salvatione et liberta di voi medesimi vi siate cinta questa incorruttibil veste dell’arme . . .”

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there is one significant passage in which the austerity and discipline of the soldier’s life is equated with the Christian ideal of poverty, and we are told that poverty is the origin of every art, profession and study known to man, and that only the lovers of poverty have pursued lib­ erty, founded republics and overthrown tyrants.52 Poverty— w e are looking here at the heritage o f the radical Franciscans— is the ideal which impels the citizen to sacrifice his private satisfactions to the common good, and the warrior, the citizen, and the Christian have here become one; but as is usually the case in Christian thought, it is the w ill to sacrifice goods, not the nonpossession of goods, which is being praised. There is no contradiction between utterances such as these and those in which we are introduced once again to the Aristotelian doctrine that a city is supported b y its m ediocri—those who are neither too poor to be citizens nor so rich that they are tempted to selfregard.53 Poverty is the virtue of the mediocri rather than the poveri. Giannotti’s thought nowhere follows this path, or extends Aris­ totelian citizenship into a realm of radical saintliness and eschatological vision, unless it be in the remark, made more than once in the R epu b ­ blica Fiorentina that the republic and the militia were restored and succeeded “ contrary to the opinion o f the wise” 54— and Guicciardini, making the same point, had come close to equating faith with madness. But if he did not think with Savonarola that the citizen must be one in whom Christian ideals were realized, he did not think with Machiavelli that Christian and civic values were ultimately incompatible. His doc­ trine that m ilitary and civic life alike realized and “ reform ed” man’s 52 Ibid., p. 344 (Alamanni): “ Oh! se fusse, o popolo mio Fiorentino, ben conosciuta da te quello che ella vale, et quanto sia da essere onorata la poverta, come ti faresti lieto di ritrovarti al presente in questo stato! Quanti pensieri, quante fatiche, quanti affanni si prendon gli uomini indarno, che si lascerieno indietro! Guarda pure quale arte, quale esercizio, quale studio lodevole oggi o mai furono in terra, et gli vedrai fabbricati tutti et messi avanti dalla poverta, unica inventrice di tutti i beni.” 53 Ibid., pp. 358-59 (Pandolfini): “ . . . la mediocrita et il mezzo sendo ottimi in ogni cosa, manifesta cosa e che la mediocre possessione della fortuna e ottima [note that fortune here can be possessed]; imperocche questi tali felicissimamente obbediscono alia ragione: ma se eccedono il modo in una o altra parte . . . e difficile obbedischino alia ragione. . . . Cosi si fa una citta di servi et padroni, non di uomini liberi. . . . Adunque la citta vuol essere di pari et simili quanto piu si puo, et da questi la citta e ben governata, et questi si conservano nella citta; perche non desiderano le cose d’altri, ne i loro beni son desiderati da altri. . . . Per la qual cosa e manifesta che la societa e ottima, che si mantiene per uomini mediocri; et quelle citta son ben governate, nelle quali son molti mediocri et possono assai.” Pandolfini’s discorso throughout is an interesting document of revolu­ tionary Aristotelianism. 54 Giannotti, Opere, 11, 37, 46, 98, 141. 2 94

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true nature precludes anything so radical as the latter; and in a sense it was his continued use of the Venetian model which indicated his separation from the former. If w e think of the fall of N iccolo Capponi as the moment at which the radical Savonarolans broke finally with the liberal ottimati like Guicciardini, it would also be the moment at which the eschatological and “ Venetian” projections of the republican image, introduced jointly b y Savonarola and Paolantonio Soderini in 1494, split apart. Giannotti, a liberal optimate who remained with the repub­ lic to the end, had nothing of the Savonarolan about him, and was left b y default to express the ideals of 1494 in Venetian terms. It was not impossible to reconcile Venetian paradigms with the idea of the supreme importance of a Consiglio Grande; the significant ten­ sions in Giannotti’s thought lay elsewhere. The revival of the militia had convinced him of the need for popolare government; but the theory which asserted that such a form of rule must rest on a warrior citizenry, though it could be stated in Aristotelian and even Savona­ rolan terms, could not escape a strongly Machiavellian coloring in the mind of one who, like Giannotti, had read the A rte della Guerra and known its author. T h e whole tradition of debate in the Orti Oricellari, to which Machiavelli and Giannotti both belonged— and to which Guicciardini must in some w ay be related— posed an antithesis between Venice and armed popular government as typified in Rome. Machia­ velli’s treatment of innovazione and virtu contains a latent dynamism hard to reconcile with Aristotelian theory o f the civic life as fulfilling a static human nature; yet the Repubblica Fiorentina, Machiavellian though it is at many points, explicitly declares its debt to Aristotle, “ from whom, as from a superabundant spring that has spread through all the world overflowing streams of doctrine, I have taken all the fundamentals of m y brief discourse,” 55 and this is in no w ay an empty compliment. W hen we add the variations that were beginning to appear within the Venetian model, between the idea of Polybian bal­ ance, the idea of a mechanized virtue, the idea of fundamental powers of government and the idea of differentiation between the component parts of a political act, and reflect that these concepts must now be applied to the theory of a government popolare in a sense in which that of Venice could never be defined, it becomes plain that the Repubblica Fiorentina, the wishful fantasy o f an exile forever divorced from politi­ cal action, is nevertheless a remarkable case study in the history of political conceptualization. Th e aim of the w ork, we are told in language b y now familiar, is to 55 Opere, 11, 12: “ Aristotile, dal quale io come da uno abbondantissimo fonte, che ha sparso per tutto’l mondo abbondantissimi fiumi di dottrina, ho preso tutti i fondamenti di questo mio breve discorso .. .” 295

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devise a durable if not a perpetual form of government for Florence.56 N o general theory of cities and their characteristics need be con­ structed, since the basic characteristics (qualita) of Florence have already been determined b y those who live there. But the form of gov­ ernment is to the character of a city as the soul to the body, and if a human soul were to be placed in a bestial body, or vice versa, the two would corrupt and destroy one another— a use of the term corruzione differing somewhat from its technical employment. W e must therefore consider what is the best form of government, but ask whether Flo r­ ence has those characteristics which render a city capable of such a form, and how this can be imposed without altering Florentine man­ ners and customs too greatly. W here the choice of a concrete and spe­ cific context drove Guicciardini to employ the analogy of the physician treating a sick man, Giannotti employs that of an architect rebuilding a house upon foundations already laid; the difference indicates the com­ parative radicalism and compulsive optimism of the refugee hoping to return.57 He proceeds to a theoretical disquisition purely Aristotelian and Polybian, in which the latter’s Book vi is cited by name58 for the first time among the writers we have studied. There are in principle three types of government, and which should obtain ought to be determined b y the location of virtii in the one, the few , or the many. He does not specify what is meant by virtu, but the context shows it to have the standard ethical meanings, with the interesting modification that the concentration of virtii in the many “ is found in those cities which have military virtue, which is the property belonging to the multitude.” 59 56 Opere, 11, 2: . . ho deliberato ragionare in che modo si possa in Firenze temperare un’amministrazione che non si possa alterare senza extrema forza estrinseca.” 57 Opere, 11, 9-10: adunque il subietto nostro la citta di Firenze tale quale ella e. nella quale vogliamo introdurre una forma di repubblica conveniente alia sue qualita, perche non ogni forma conviene a ciascheduna citta, ma solamente quella la quale puote in tal citta lungo tempo durare. Perciocche siccome il corpo prende vita daH’anima, cosi la citta dalla forma della repubblica, tal che se non e conveniente tra loro, e ragionevole che l’una e l’altra si corrompa e guasti, siccome avverrebbe se un’anima umana fusse con un corpo di bestia congiunta, o un’animo di bestia con un corpo umano; perche l’uno darebbe impedimento all’altro, di che seguirebbe la corruzione . . . siccome anco fanno i prudenti architettori, i quali chiamati a disegnare un palazzo per edificare sopra i fondamenti gettati per l’addietro, non alterano in cosa alcuna i trovati fondamenti; ma secondo le qualita loro disegnano un edificio conveniente a quegli; e se hanno a racconciare una casa, non la rovinano tutta, ma solo quelle parti che hanno difetto; ed all’altre lassate intere si vanno accomodando.” 58 Opere, 11, 17. 59 Opere, 11, 13-14: “ Queste tre specie di reggimento nascono da questo, perche 296

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If virtu in the one or the few means the ability to govern with regard to the good of all, it would be valuable to know if Giannotti shared M achiavelli’s reasons for holding that this ability can only exist among the many if it takes a military form. H owever, he does not clar­ ify his remark, but goes on to explain that each of the three types can exist only in ideality. There is no difference between the good and the bad form of each except the virtue or corruption of the ruling group; and it follows, first, that nothing prevents the degeneration of each type except the rulers’ ability to escape the moral corruption which is rooted in their natures,00 and second, that it would be morally impos­ sible to establish any of the three pure types in the actual world, where we must presuppose that men are corrupt already.01 N othing is said about fortuna, and, despite his acknowledged debt to Polybius, Gian­ notti employs neither the idea of the cycle as a determinate order of succession of the forms nor the concept that each pure type is cor­ rupted b y the excessive power of its own special virtue; but we are clearly in that Christian world in which history is the dimension of the Fall of man, to which all these concepts could be rhetorically appropriate. A theory of mixed government (governo misto or stato misto) now makes its appearance, in a form m arkedly more Aristotelian than P olyb­ in ciascuna citta o egli si trova uno che e virtuosissimo, o pochi o mold virtuosi. . . . Ma dove i mold sono di virtu ornati, quivi nasce quella terza specie di governo chiamata repubblica, la quale amministrazione si e trovato in quelle citta, che hanno virtu militare, la quale e propria della moltitudine.” 60 Opere, n, 16: “ . . . bene e vero, che nelle tre rette, quelli che ubbidiscono stanno subietti volontariamente; nelle tre corrotte, stanno paziente per forza; e percio si puo dire che le buone siano dalle corrotte in quello differenti. . . . Nondimeno a me pare . . . che questa differenza non sia propria, ma piuttosta acci­ dental, perche puo essere che i subietti nella tirannide volontariamente ubbidiscano, essendo corrotti dal tiranno con largizioni ed altre cose, che si fanno per tenere gli uomini tranquilli e riposati. Non essendo adunque altra differenza tra i buoni e tra i corrotti governi che quella che e generata dal fine da loro inteso e seguitato, seguita che i buoni senza alcuna difficolta, cioe senza intrinseca o estrinseca alterazione, si possono corrompere e divenir malvagii.” 61 Opere, n, 18: “ . . . tale introduzione e impossibile, perche essendo gli uomini piu malvagii che buoni, e curandosi molto piu de’ privati comodi che del pubblico, credo fermamente che nei tempi nostri non si trovi subietto che le possa ricevere, perche in ciascuna di quelle tre sorte si presuppongono gli uomini buoni: tal che avendo i subietti a ubbidire volontariamente a quello, se e uno, o a quelli, se son pochi o mold virtuosi, non saria mai possibile indurre a cio gli uomini non buoni, i quali per natura loro sono invidiosi, rapaci e ambiziosi, e vogliono sempre piu che alle sua natura non conviene . . . Per la qual cosa non si potendo le buone repubbliche, e le malvagie non essendo convenevole introdurre, e necessario trovare un modo e una forma di governo, che si possa o sia onesto introdurre: questo modo e questa forma per questa via, si potra agevolmente trovare.”

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ian, and Christian rather than Hellenic in the sense that it is intended for fallen and im perfectly rational men. In every city there are dif­ ferent types of citizens with different desires. There are the rich and great who desire to command; these are necessarily few in number, and the differentiation of the “ one” from the “ few ” appears only because there are degrees o f authority and preeminence which only one man can enjoy at a time. There are the many poor, who do not wish to command, or to be commanded b y any authority less universal than that of the laws; and there are the m ediocri, who as well as desiring liberta in the sense just defined have sufficient fortune to desire onore— plainly meaning a share in command— in addition.62 It is the latter who fulfill Aristotle’s definition of the citizen as one who rules and is ruled, and if only for this reason it would be erroneous to assign them the role of the “ few .” T he grandi clearly possess many “ oligarchical” characteristics, and it emerges a little later, in the true Aristotelian tra­ dition, that it is possible for the m ediocri to be so numerous that they absorb the category o f the “ many poor” altogether; Giannotti’s numer­ ical and his qualitative categories do not, as they need not, perfectly coincide. W hat is important at this stage is that we are studying men’s desires, not their virtues. These desideri are also called umori, a term w hich carries nonrational connotations; they are irrational because they are incompatible, there being no w ay of combining, without m odify­ ing, the desire of some to command with the desire of others to be commanded b y none. Form ally, it might seem, this could be done by establishing a rule of laws, or b y incorporating all citizens within the category of m ediocri who both command and are commanded; but whether as a Christian, an Aristotelian, or a Machiavellian, it is impor­ tant that Giannotti was convinced that the umori could never w holly be abolished and consequently that no mixed government could ever be a perfect blend.63 62 Opere, n, 18-19: “ . . . i grandi, perche eccedono gli altri in nobilta e ricchezze, vogliono comandare non ciascuno da per se, ma tutti insieme, percio vorriano una forma di governo nella quale essi solo tenessero l’imperio; e tra loro ancora sempre alcuno si trova che aspira al principato e vorrebbe comandar solo. I poveri non si curano di comandare, ma temendo l’insolenza de’ grandi, non vorriano ubbidire se non a chi senza distinzione a tutti comanda, cioe alle leggi, e pero basta loro esser liberi, essendo quegli libero che solamente alle leggi ubbidisce. I mediocri hanno il medesimo desiderio de’ poveri, perche ancora essi appetiscono la liberta; ma perche la fortuna loro e alquanto piu rilevata, percio oltre alia liberta, desiderano ancora onore. Possiamo adunque dire che in ogni citta sia chi desidera liberta, e chi oltre alia liberta onore, e chi grandezza, o solo o accompagnato.” 63 Opere, 11, 19-20: “A volere adunque istituire un governo in una citta, dove siano tali umori, bisogna pensare di ordinarlo in modo che ciascuna di quelle parti ottenga il desiderio suo; e quelle repubbliche che sono cosi ordinate si puo dire 298

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G overno misto is, initially at least, a beneficent deception practiced on irrational men. It is possible to introduce a modo di vivere— in fact, if we look closely, this is the only w ay in which a modo di vivere can be introduced— in which men are given part of what they want, 01 are given it conditionally, in such a shape that they believe they have been given the whole of it, or have been given it absolutely.64 The incompatibility of their desires is an incompatibility arising from the nature of power; some men cannot command all while others are free from command b y any; and therefore the beneficent deception con­ sists in the fact that the former receive authority and the latter liberty, in such a w ay that each party’s enjoyment of its desire is conditional upon the will of the other. In the form of government we are seeking it is necessary that one man be prince, but that his principate is not dependent on himself alone; that the great command, but that their authority does not originate with themselves; that the multitude be free, but that their liberty involves some dependence; and finally that the m ediocri, as well as being free, can attain to honours (onori— the word in the plural has the secondary meaning of “ offices” ), but in such a w ay as is not placed entirely at their will . . .65 But the deception m ay lead men beyond the point of illusion. Assum­ ing that it is the property of man as a rational political animal to rule with an eye to the common good, and assuming that this state o f mutual political dependence will compel men so to rule whether they intend to or not, such a distribution of functions (Giannotti calls it arrnninistrazione) will make men rational; umori will become virtii. But the agency precipitating them from unreason into reason is a structure of che sono perfette, perche, possedendo in esse gli uomini le cose desiderate, non hanno cagione di far tumulto, e percio simili stati si possono quasi eterni reputare. A ’ desiderii di queste parti similmente non si puo soddisfare, perche bisogneria introdurre in una citta un regno, uno stato di pochi ed un governo di molti, il che non si puo immaginare, non che mettere in atto, salvo che in Genova, dove innanzi che Messer Andrea Doria le avesse con grandissima sua gloria renduta la liberta, si vedeva una repubblica ed una tirannide.” 64 Opere, n, 20: “Possonsi bene detti desiderii ingannare, cioe si puo intro­ durre un modo di vivere nel quale a ciascuna di quelle parti paja ottenere il desiderio suo, quantunque pienamente non l’ottenga.” 65 Ibid.: “ Onde in questo governo che cerchiamo bisogna che uno sia principe, ma che il suo principato non dependa da lui; bisogna che i grandi comandino, ma che tale autorita non abbia origine da loro; bisogna che la moltitudine sia libera, ma che tal liberta abbia dependenza; e finalmente che i mediocri, oltre all’esser liberi, possano ottenere onori, ma che tal facolta non sia nel loro arbitrio collocata . . 299

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powers, arranged so that they depend upon and condition one another. Once these powers are exercised rationally, they become faculties in the individual w hereby he acts rationally and politically and governs the actions of others (as they govern his) so that they act in the same w ay. That is, powers too have become virtu ; and it is characteristic of the active connotations which this word always bore that Giannotti is able on occasion to use it interchangeably with terms like forze and potestd. The polity, once again, is a contrivance of human intelligence for the institutionalization of virtu : for assigning men functions which will require them to act in such a w ay that their natures are reformed and are once again what they are, instead of what they have become. Such a contrivance depends on the existence of m ediocri, the only people capable of governing and being governed, and therefore of sub­ stituting rational behavior for the irrationalism of those who can only command or only obey. If there were a city consisting w holly of m ediocri, it could be a dem ocracy of the pure type— we know that the virtu of the mediocri would be military— but there is none.66 W here the m ediocri are stronger than, or equal to, the grandi and poveri in combination, or where they hold the balance of strength between the two, a governo misto is possible and indeed necessary, if the city is not to suffer that corruption which comes when the soul is disproportionate to the body. It remains to be shown that Florence satisfies these conditions and Giannotti proceeds to do so, in the form of a history of the city which indicates how his Aristotelian grounding had given him a more subtle and sanguine grasp of historical causation, and delivered him further from the grip of fortuna, than a merely Polybian theory of cycles could have done. His thought will also be found strikingly anticipatory of that of James Harrington in the next century. Giannotti contends that Florence used to be a city of grandi and poveri, and has in the last century become increasingly one of mediocri. T o understand this, he claims, is to understand Florentine history both before and after the Medicean regime of 1434-1494. Had he employed the scheme of Polybius’s sixth book to this end, it would have sug­ gested that rule by the few (grandi) had given place to rule by the many (p o veri) and then to rule b y a tyrant (Cosimo) and so round the clock again; each form would have existed in its purity, decayed through spontaneous inner degeneration and collapsed through some combination of circumstances precipitated by unpredictable fortuna. But such a scheme was unlikely to satisfy Florentines of the 1530s, whether historically or philosophically; they knew too much about the past by w ay of data, and demanded too much by w ay o f explanation. 66 Opere, 11, 24. 300

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Giannotti lays it down that in considering every event (azione), one must examine the general cause ( cagione), the precipitating cause (ioccasione), and the immediate cause (principio). In the case of the fall of the Florentine republic in 15 12 , the cagione was the discontent of certain ambitious oligarchs with the form of government, the occa­ sione was the war between Pope Julius and the king of France, and the principio was the attack of the Spanish arm y on Prato and Flor­ ence. Cagione is a disposition of things, which makes itself felt when occasione offers, and very frequently it is also the cause w h y occasione appears.67 In the case of Florentine politics in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we are concerned with an unstable alternation between the stati of grandi and popolo— Giannotti is clearly not thinking of it as a cycle— and the cagione or disposizione was the rough equality between the forces (fo rz e) of the two. The monopoly of qualitd b y the one was answered b y the ascendancy of quantity in the other, so that nei­ ther could prevail or destroy its adversary— Giannotti would have agreed with Machiavelli’s further contention that neither could devise a system of government acceptable to the other— and the victory of either party was the result of occasione, which might at some future date, and generally did, prove propitious to the other.68 In this case cagione was all, and it is clearly of no importance what the various occasioni m ay have been. It is useful to contrast Machiavelli’s use of occasione in II Principe, where it signified the extreme irrationality and 67 Opere, 11, 37-38: “Ed e da notare che in tutte le azioni sono da considerare tre cose, la cagione, l’occasione e il principio. Sono molti che pigliano l’occasione per la cagione, e della cagione non fanno conto, come saria se alcuno (poniamo) dicesse che la cagione della rovina dello stato di Firenze nel m d x ii fosse la differenza che nacque tra Papa Giulio ed il re di Francia, e l’aver perduto il re di Francia Milano; la qual cosa non fu la cagione, ma l’occasione, e la cagione fu la mala contentezza d’alcuni cittadini malvagii ed ambiziosi; il principio poi fu la venuta ed assalto degli Spagnuoli per rimettere i Medici. Non e adunque la cagione altro che una disposizione, la quale si risente qualche volta l’occasione si scopre, e molto spesso e tanto potente la cagione, che non aspetta, anzi fa nascere l’occasione.” 68 Opere, 11, 39: . . era necessario che le parti tumultuassero, e quando reggesse l’uno, e quando l’altro; e se alcuno domandasse qual sia stata l’occasione, perche i grandi non prevalessero mai tanto al popolo, ne il popolo ai grandi, che l’una parte e l’altra potesse lo stato suo fermare, dico che la cagione di tal cosa era perche le forze del popolo e de’ grandi erano uguali, e pero l’una non poteva abbassare mai l’altra intieramente; e quando l’una prevaleva all’altra nasceva dall’occasioni, che erano ora a questa parte, ora a quell’altra conformi, e non era possi­ ble, quando l’una prevaleva all’altra, che interamente si assicurasse . . Cf. pp. 42-43 for the contrast between quantity in the popolo and qualitd—“nobilita, ricchezze e favori, dignita, disciplina e simili cose . . . reputazione, ricchezze, clientele, favori, cosi esterni come domestici”—in the nobili. 301

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unpredictability of the particular event in a world of fortuna. Machia­ velli knew far more about historical causation than that, but the con­ trast is still worth drawing. Giannotti’s occasione is still the random unpredictable which turns the wheel and overthrows power systems, but the instability of politics is now caused rather than inherent. G randi and poveri, quality and quantity, authority and liberty, constitute an unstable equilibrium from which most men cannot escape, being what they are; but one can see w h y their natures constitute instability, and consequently one can see how stability might replace it. Fortuna con­ sequently plays little role in his system, and the word is hardly used. He relies instead on an Aristotelian theory of causation, and an Aris­ totelian theory of social forces. Harrington, constructing in the next century an account o f English history along comparable lines, ascribed to the king and barons of medieval England a role very like that of Giannotti’s grandi and poveri; they were locked in an unstable equilibrium until the Tudors under­ mined baronial power b y raising up a landowning people, whose advent proved no less ruinous to a monarchy that could no longer govern them.69 A similar role is allotted b y Giannotti to the Medici of the fifteenth century, who, b y advancing poor men to office and depriving the aristocrats of any chance to display generosita and grandezza except at the nod of the ruling family, depressed some and exalted others to form a new and grow ing class of m ediocri, who now hold the balance of power and make a stable governo misto possible in Florence.70 Since 1530 the Medici have ruled with the support of a few grandi who owe them their advancement and a few more whom the excesses of the siege have alienat[i] dal vivere universale e politico, but their tyranny is self-abolishing; it deprives all men of what they desire and increases the number of m ediocri whose presence alone can ensure that they achieve their various ends.71 Like Harrington, Giannotti was a poor prophet but a successful enricher of the conceptual vocabulary; both 69 See below, pp. 388-89. 70 See, at length, Opere, 11, 45-48. 71 Opere, 11, 47-48: “£ succeduto poi il secondo ritomo de’ Medici nel m d x x x con quella violenza che e nota a tutto’l mondo, e perche nella resistenza grande che s’e fatta loro, sono stati offesi mold cittadini di gran qualita, e necessario che abbiano l’animo alienato dal vivere universale e politico, parendo loro essere stati da quello maltrattati; la qual cosa pare che generi quella stessa difficulta all’introduzione d’un vivere civile che saria se la citta, cosi come gia era, fusse piena di grandi, e mancasse di mediocri, come di sopra discorremmo. Ma questa difficulta a poco a poco manca, per il violento modo di vivere che al presente si osserva, nel quale tutti i cittadini, di qualunque grado, appariscono concultati ed abbietti, senza onore, e senza reputazione, e senza autorita. Talche e necessario che ciascuno, deposti gli odii particolari ed unite le volonta, viva con desiderio grande di pacifico e quiete vivere, ed aspetti l’occasione di ricuperarlo.”

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men developed schemes of causation which w rongly predicted political stabilization and an end to historical turbulence, but increased the extent to which sequences of political change could be talked about in terms, concrete and social, which were not those of the irrational particularities of fortuna. One is tempted to say that both offered w ays out of the Polybian cycle and into the rotating spheres of ordered government; but in fact their causal vocabularies were so rich that they never had recourse to the Polybian model at all. T h e vocabulary of Aristotle was less stilted, and it is this that Giannotti is using. T he apparatus of political analysis which it is possible to bring to bear on the city’s problems continues to be a crucial question in Book ii of the Repubblica Fiorentina, which is devoted to a criticism of the republican constitutions of 1 4 9 4 - 1 5 0 2 - 15 12 and 15 2 7 - 15 3 0 . Reform ing legislators, Giannotti begins, like Numa and Lycurgus, have a harder task than those who found cities where none have existed before (we should remember that Machiavelli in the Discorsi, though not in 11 Principe, had on the whole treated Lycurgus as belonging to this class). The latter have only to know what is good and may be fairly sure of the support of the unformed matter whom they lead and mold; but the former have to know what has been w ron gly managed in previous con­ stitutions, and there are familiar difficulties about this. In the first place there are always those who are used (assuefatti) to the previous order and will change only with difficulty; this is w h y Num a had to feign divine assistance and Lycurgus to use violence72 (w e recall the armed prophet of 11 Principe). In the second place constitutional defects belong in the category of cose particolari, which are hard to under­ stand b y any means over and above mere experience; and in the third place no man is so free from human affections that he can always see clearly defects in which he has himself been involved.73 Savonarola, both as a foreigner and as a friar, could hardly be expected to know much about the workings of Florentine institutions; nevertheless, the Consiglio Grande which he helped introduce would have reformed itself b y degrees, if given time and if the treachery of certain grandi had not brought back the Medici.74 72 Opere, 11, 52-53. 73 Opere, 11, 53: “A che si aggiugne che la considerazione de’ difetti, nei quali hanno di bisogno di reformazione, e molto malagevole, non solamente perche in cose particolari consistono, le quali con difficolta si possono altrimenti che per esperienza conoscere, ma perche ancora niuno mai si trovo che tanto fosse libero dalle umane affezioni che in ogni cosa il difetto e mancamento suo potesse vedere . . .” 74 Opere, 11, 54-55: “Non conobbe adunque Fra Girolamo questi particolari mancamenti, ne e da maravigliarsene molto; perche essendo forestiero e religioso, non poteva trovarsi nelle pubbliche amministrazioni; talche veduti egli i modo del

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It is therefore of great importance to know if we can develop a political science by which the deficiencies of previous constitutions can be exposed and corrected. Giannotti proceeds to a critique of both republican constitutions, in which he argues that although the Consiglio Grande was nominally the foundation of the system, in practice the various magistracies— including the Ten and in some respects the G on ­ faloniere— exercised so much irresponsible power that effective author­ ity was in the hands of a few .75 This disguised oligarchy should not be confused with a disguised aristocracy; Giannotti’s links with the liberal ottimati are still strong enough to make him stress that this state of things alienated them from the government so much that their hos­ tility grew worse under the gonfalonierate for life of 15 0 2-15 12, of which he otherwise approves, and that one’s detestation of their treach­ ery should not blind one to its causes (cagioni, not occasioni).76 In these chapters he is essentially resuming and reworking the themes of the Letter to Capponi, and two lines of constitutional analysis are reappear­ ing. In the first place it is evident that the irresponsibility of the various magistracies arose from a failure to separate powers: they could do as they liked because they had deliberazione as well as consultazione. W hen Giannotti reverts, as he does some chapters later, to the recom­ mendation of Venetian voting procedures, it is because these decisively separate the function of resolving from the function of proposing. But in the second place— and this is less unambiguously Venetian— there is the thought that the irresponsibility of the magistrates meant that their power was not, as it should have been, dependent on the power of some authority outside themselves. T he structure of mutual inter­ dependence which was the essence of governo misto must at some stage be worked out in full. But at this moment Giannotti strikes a new note, indicative of the movement of his ideas toward popular suprem­ acy, b y saying that the familiar four powers— election of magistrates, procedere in esse, avesse potuto far giudizio di quello che era bene o male ordinato . . .” 75 Opere, 11, 59: “ In Firenze adunque nei due passati governi, la creazione de’ magistrati senza dubbio era in potere degli assai, perche tutta la citta dependeva dal gran consiglio, e pero in questa parte la citta era libera; la deliberazione della pace e guerra era in potere del magistrato dei dieci, i quali di quelle due cose, e conseguentemente di tutto lo stato della citta potevano disponere; di che seguitava che i pochi e non gli assai fossero signori dello stato della citta: e dove tal cosa avviene, quivi non puo esser vera e sincera liberta.” 76 Opere, 11, 81-82: “ . . . talche costretti da questa mala contentezza, consentirono alia rovina di quello stato, ed a rimettere i Medici; benche questi tali non meritino laude alcuna, anzi biasimo e vituperio, non e pero che quel modo di procedere sia da biasimere e da correggere, per tor via le cagioni di quelle male contentezze. . . .” 304

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peace and war, hearing of appeals, and legislation— which constitute the vigore (form erly the nervo) of government, must be in the control of whoever is to be signore of the city. If the many are to rule they must possess the four powers, or such a city will not be truly free.77 Clearly the problem is where the four powers are to be located in a governo misto, but all Giannotti has to say at the moment is that it was insufficient to vest the election of magistrates in the Consiglio Grande— even though in that respect the city might be termed free— if peace and war were to remain in the irresponsible control of the T en .78 This rendered the right of appeal against magistrates’ decisions virtually meaningless; while as for legislation, though it was nominally deter­ mined b y the Consiglio, it was for all practical purposes in the hands of a few men. That election of magistrates alone is insufficient is shown b y the practice of the Medici, who always controlled the appointment of those who managed the three remaining powers and left the elec­ tion of others entirely free. The master of the three, not the four, pow ­ ers is master of all.79 Giannotti is on the point of breaking new ground, which will lead his thought aw ay from a simple mixture of three elements or a simple institutionalization of virtu. But for the present he has finished his analysis of the remedial knowledge which a reform ing legislator of Florence must possess, and has now to blend it with the universal prin­ ciples on which such a figure must proceed. T he aim of the legislator, we read at the beginning of Book in, is to erect a state which will last; states fall either through internal dissension or through external assault; a buon governo provides against the form er danger, a buona milizia against the latter— though it may also be considered part of buon governo and functioning to the form er end. W e now enter upon the 77 The first occurrence of this thought is at Opere, n, 58-59: “ Ma e da notare che quattro sono le cose nelle le quali consiste il vigore di tutta la repubblica; l’elezione de’ magistrati; la deliberazione della pace e guerra; e provocazioni; e l’introduzione delle leggi; le quali quattro cose sempre devono essere in potere di chi e signore della citta. Per la qual cosa in quei governi, dove gli assai reggono, e necessario che sieno in potesta degli assai, altrimenti in quella citta, dove sieno tali amministrazioni, non sarebbe liberta.” 78 Cf. the Letter to Capponi, above, and nn. 32, 75. 79 Opere, 11, 59-60: “ Veniva adunque la citta quanto alia creazione de’ magistrati ad esser libera, ma quanto all’altre tre cose, che non sono di minore importanza, non era libera ma all’arbitrio e podesta di pochi soggetta. Che le tre ultime cose non fossero di minor momento che la creazione de’ magistrati e manifesto, se non per altra, perche chi e stato padrone delle tirannidi passato non si e curato dell’elezione de’ magistrati, eccetto quelli ne’ quali era posto l’autorita delle tre dette cose, parendo loro che chi e signore di quelle sia signore di tutto; e senza dubbio, chi puo deliberare della pace e guerra, introdurre leggi ed ha il ricorso de’ magistrati, e padrone d’ogni cosa.” 305

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Machiavellian problem of deciding whether civil or military organiza­ tion should come first, and the figure of Romulus makes his appearance. But whereas it was Lycurgus who attended to governo and milizia simultaneously, before Romulus gave a thought to either he devoted himself to acts of violence against his neighbors and to the aggrandize­ ment of his people’s empire. It might seem that this choice was con­ ducive to, if not identical with, m ilitary organization; but it appears to have been the Rape of the Sabines that Giannotti had principally in mind, and he comments that behavior of this kind can only have origi­ nated in the lust for domination, since Romulus had enough men to make a city and there were, after all, other w ays of procuring women for them.80 A little later Romulus is stated to have attended to civil before military organization; so that the effect of Giannotti’s analysis is to separate him sharply from Machiavelli’s view that because Rome was from the beginning organized for expansion, she was developed along military and therefore along popular lines. This initial repudia­ tion of the Roman model, to be carried further in later chapters, assists in the reintroduction of Venetian concepts; and it rests in part on the implication that the function of the militia is preservative rather than aggressive. Venice, preferring stability to empire, went so far as to have no civic militia at all; but Giannotti, with the experience of the Siege behind him, is clear that the function of the militia is defensive. Rom e was held b y Bruni and Machiavelli to have destroyed republican virtu in the rest of the world and to have lost her own in consequence; but a nonaggressive militia may remain a means of inculcating virtu in the citizens. Men defended the republic of 1 527-1530 where that of 15 12 fell without a struggle, and the main reason was that a citizen militia existed at the later date but not at the earlier (Machiavelli’s had been a militia of contadini and Giannotti was aware of the theo­ retical difference). The ideal Florence is to be armed and popular like Rome, but stable and peaceable like Venice; and Giannotti has moved decisively aw ay from the restless dynamism of Machiavelli. The militia in its politicizing aspects is only a part of the apparatus of buon go verno, and he now gives the latter so great a priority that for the 80 Opere, 11, 96-97: “Penso adunque Romulo a fare violenza, e d’avere a vincere, e per conseguente al propagare Pimperio, e far grande la sua repubblica. La cagione ancora, che l’indusse a far tal violenza, non fu altro che la cupidita dell’imperio, perche se non voleva quello accrescere, non gli era necessario usare tal violenza; perciocche aveva tanti uomini, che facevano conveniente corpo d’una citta non ambiziosa, la quale si voglia solamente mantenere, e non desideri accrescimento; e delle donne per gli uomini suoi avrebbe trovato in spazio di tempo, senza che quelle d’Alba non gli sariano mai mancate.” 306

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rest of the book he lays, on the whole, less stress on the militia’s power to make men virtuous than he had in 1528.81 Since what he is designing for Florence is a governo misto and not a pure dem ocracy, we have to understand the role in a governo misto both of a militia— w e have been told that m ilitary virtue is a demo­ cratic characteristic— and of the four powers of government, since their location determines who shall be signore of a city and we do not yet know the place of such a signore in a mixed government. Giannotti proceeds to develop a critical analysis of the idea of mixed government. This can mean, he says, either that the three parts (one, few , and m any; grandi, m ediocri, popolari) exercise powers equal to one another, or that some one of them exercises power (forze, potenza) greater than either of the other two; the aim in each case is to produce an equilibrium. If we think carefully, we shall see that the former is bound to be defective. The reason is that a mixture of political ele­ ments is not like a mixture of natural elements, in which each com­ ponent (sem plice) loses its distinctive virtii and the compound acquires a virtu of its own. A political mixture is made up of men, of grandi, m ediocri and popolari, each of whom remains after mixture what he was before (unless, presumably, all have become m ediocri, in which case we are not constructing a mixed government at all). Each retains his distinctive characteristic, which Giannotti is now calling virtu, not umore or (as he might have done) fantasia; and these virtu consist of desires and the power to pursue them, which we m erely institutionalize in the construction of a polity. It is therefore impossible to “ temper a state so perfectly that the virtu— let us call it power— of each part is not apparent,” and if these are equal, then the oppositions and resist­ ances between them will be equal, and the republic will be full of dis­ sensions which will bring about its ruin.82 Giannotti has analyzed the 81 Opere, 11, 98-99: “ Ma se noi consideriamo bene, e di maggiore importanza introdurre una buona forma di repubblica, perche dietro a questa agevolmente s’introdurra buona milizia: ma dove fosse la milizia introdotta, non saria forse cosi agevolmente introdurre buona ordinazione; perche naturalmente gli uomini militari sono meno che gli altri trattabile. E percio Romulo primieramente introdusse gli ordini civili, e poi gli ordini militari; e potette costui in brevissimo tempo ogni cosa condurre, perche essendo principe assoluto non aveva che contradicesse. . . . In Firenze adunque, essendo di maggiore importanza introdurre un buon governo che una buona milizia (perche invero la citta ne’ tempi passati ha piuttosto patito per mancamento di governo che di milizia, forse per le qualita delParmi e de’ tempi) tratteremo prima di quella parte . . .” 82 Opere, 11, 99-100: “ . . . il primo modo, secondo il quale le forze di ciascuna parte sono eguali a quelle dell’altra, senza dubbio e difettivo e non si debbe seguitare, perche non e possibile temperare uno stato tanto perfettamente che la virtu (vogliamo dire potesta di ciascuna parte) non apparisca; perciocche in tal mistione

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term virtu in such a w ay as to bring about the substitution of a mecha­ nistic for a pseudo-organic model in political analogy; Guicciardini’s cook, stirring a mound of pasta, has disappeared. It further follows that Polybius was w rong in seeing the Roman republic as the model of mixed government. He declares that ambas­ sadors to Rome, when dealing with the consuls, thought they were in a kingdom; when with the senate, in an aristocracy; when with the populus, in a democracy. But this indicates that the power of each was equal to and uncontrolled by that of each other, and if this was so it is small wonder that the republic was prey to civil dissensions. Had it been well-ordered, ambassadors would have sensed in dealing with the consuls their dependence on the senate and the people, with the senate their dependence on the consuls and the people, and with the people their dependence on the consuls and the senate; and the virtu of each would have been temperata by the others. This should have been attended to by Brutus and his colleagues at the expulsion of the kings, and it can be argued that they tried to vest superiority in the senate; but assuming that Polybius is right in his facts, the equality of power between the three organs of government exposed Rome to that insta­ bility and strife which destroyed her in the end.83 T h e repudiation of Polybius carries to a further stage Giannotti’s repudiation of Machiavelli on the subject of Rome. He has already im plicitly rejected Machiavelli’s contention that the armed popular state must be one organized for expansion; he now rejects his conten­ tion that Roman civil strife was a sign of health because it led to the institution of the tribunate (of which Giannotti has very little to say). T he more Rome is eliminated from paradigmatic stature, the more fas­ cinating becomes his evident intention of employing Venetian forms and concepts for the organization of an armed popular state. The cru­ cial point, however, is Giannotti’s drastic remodeling of the concept of governo misto, not least because this anticipates so much in English and American constitutional thought during the seventeenth and eight­ eenth centuries. His contention at the moment is that you cannot con­ struct a balance of equal and independent forces because the pressures avviene il contrario che nella mistione delle cose naturali, nella quale le virtu particolari delle cose di che si fa mistione non rimangono nel misto apparenti, ma di tutte se ne fa una sole; la qual cosa non puo nel temperare una repubblica avvenire; perche bisogneria pestare e tritare in modo gli uomini, che dei grandi, popolari e mediocri se ne facesse una sol cosa diversa in tutto da quelle tre fazioni; la qual cosa senza dubbio e impossibile. Rimanendo adunque le virtu di ciascuna parte apparenti nella mistione, e necessario che essendo l’opposizioni e resistenze eguali, non manchino le repubbliche in tal modo temperate di civili dissensioni, le quali aprano la via alia rovina loro.” 83 Opere, n, 101-103. 308

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and counterpressures between them will be equal and there will be no resolution of the contest. But we know that political authority is of so many kinds and can be distributed in so many combinations that it is possible to render three agents mutually dependent, and it may seem theoretically possible to erect a system of three equal yet inter­ dependent parts. Giannotti does not examine this possibility; he assumes that interdependence requires inequality, to the extent that one part must enjoy a preponderance over the other two (la repubblica deve inclinare in una parte). A principal reason seems to be that one must institutionalize conflict; there will always be competition among the powers, and if all are theoretically equal a loser may blame a victor for his loss and pursue internecine strife instead of the common good, whereas if the loser’s inferiority is built into the structure of the repub­ lic it will be accepted as legitimate. Giannotti stresses that he does not mean the preponderant part to enjoy an imperio from which the others are excluded, but merely that it shall be less dependent on them than they on it. He has yet to make clear what is the relevance to all this of his doctrine that the four powers of government must belong to the signore or padrone, and whether indeed such terms are applicable to that part to which la repubblica inclina .84 The next step is to consider whether the preponderant part should be the grandi or the popolo (that it might be the one on whom the few and the many depend he does not consider a contemporary possibility, though he holds that this provided a stable government in prerepubli­ can Rom e). Giannotti argues the case for the people at considerable length, much as Machiavelli had, and not all his arguments need detain us. The indictment of Roman institutions is resumed, but in a w ay revealing some significant tensions. W e are told that if the people feel themselves oppressed b y a particular individual, they rush to his house and revenge themselves b y burning it down— such at least is the w ay of Florence— whereas if they feel that their wrongs are the result of the maldistribution o f public authority they agitate for legal and insti­ tutional reforms which will assure them of greater justice and a greater 84 Opere, 11, 103: “ . . . quella parte dove la repubblica inclina, viene ad esser piu potente che l’altra; e pero facilmente puo opprimere gli insulti che le fossero fatti; e perche quella potenza che ha nasce dalla forma della repubblica, pero se la parte contraria si reputa ingiuriata, non l’imputa alia fazione avversa ma alia forma della repubblica. E perche la repubblica e temperata in modo che non vi e adito a rovinarla, pero e necessato che viva quieta; onde in tale repubblica non puo nascere alterazione alcuna. £ ben da notare che quando io dico che la repubblica deve inclinare in una parte, non dico che quella parte abbia sola l’imperio, e l’altra sia esclusa dall’amministrazione, ma che l’una abbia poca dependenza e l’altra assai. . . . Concludendo adunque dico che e necessario che una repubblica inclina ad una parte, a volere che sia diuturna e viva sempre senza alterazioni civili.” 309

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share of power; and this explains w h y the struggle between the orders at Rome was relatively bloodless until the time of the Gracchi and brought the plebeians increasing participation in authority.85 This point clearly owes much to Machiavelli’s argument concerning the benefi­ cent effects of strife at Rome, which Giannotti otherwise wished to reject. Elsewhere we read that if at the expulsion of the Tarquins the senate had been made dependent on the people instead of the reverse, the people would have been free from injuries and the senate weaker than the people, and Rome would as a result have been more tranquil and escaped the dissensions which ultimately destroyed her; the repub­ lic would have been eternal and her empire stabilissimo.86 Rome, a popular state to Machiavelli, is to Giannotti as to Guicciardini a rather unstable optimacy. There are some, he adds— though Machiavelli is plainly meant here— who argue that Rome could not have expanded (cr esc esse) without these civil dissensions, but that is true only of Rom e as she was organized and it can be held that she would have expanded much more efficiently without them if organized on a popu­ lar basis.87 But Giannotti has already indicated that imperial expansion is not a necessary mark of the armed popular state. One is left feeling that he had considerable difficulty in getting out of Machiavelli’s shadow, if only because he aimed at establishing positions so like and yet unlike his— the armed popular state without Rome, Venice without her aristocracy or mercenaries. He is happier developing Aristotelian and Machiavellian arguments for the superiority of the popolo. These are, in general,88 that the few desire to command, an impulse easily destructive of the common good, where that liberta which the many desire to preserve— that condition in which each enjoys his own under law — is close to being the common good itself. Furthermore, the few command and the many obey— i.e., they obey the laws, rather than the few — and it is easier for one who 85 Opere, n, 107-108: “ . . . se possono apporre la cagione delle ingiurie ricevute a qualche particolare, subito li corrono a casa, e coll’ armi e col fuoco si vendicano, siccome in Firenze molte volte si trova essere avvenuto. Ma se tali cagioni nascono dall’ordinazione della repubblica, talche a nessuno particolare si possano applicare, allora i popolari, non avendo contro a chi voltare l’ira sua, si separano da’ grandi, e chieggono o legge o magistrato per lo quale si possano difendere ed ottenere la loro ragione; e questo fu grandissima cagione che ne’ tumulti del popolo Romano contro al senato, non si venne mai al sangue de’ cittadini, insino ai Gracchi; perche le ingiurie che pativano i popolari non da’ privati cittadini, ma dalla forma della repubblica nascevano, e percio l’ingiuriati non de’ cittadini ma dell’ordine della repubblica si potevano lamentare; onde avveniva che nelle sovversioni non chiedeva altro che qualche legge o qualche magistrato, per virtu della quale si difendesse, e la potenza de’ pochi si venisse ad abbassare, ed essi piu della repubblica partecipassero.” 86 Opere, 11, 1 14-15. 87 Opere, pp. 1 15-16. 88 Opere, 11, 104-16. 310

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knows how to obey the laws to learn how to give commands than for one whose aim is always to command to subject his will to law. The habit of obeying a wide variety of laws gives the many a certain pru­ dence, which the few often lack since their passions know few er restraints; practical experience and book-learning, the sources of pru­ dence considered as information, are as accessible to popolari as to grandi-** and since the form er outnumber the latter, “ it can be said with probability that they make up a greater aggregate of prudence.” 90 Giannotti puts forw ard a democratic theory of prudenza. Instead of being the reward of the elite who thrust themselves into public service in pursuit of onore, it is the reward of those who obey the laws, pool their experience, suffer injuries rather than inflict them and react by the collective pursuit of public remedies rather than b y the aristocratic pursuit of revenge on particular enemies. T he many’s interest in liberta means that they are better politicized, more apt to accept public authority as legitimate, than the ambitious few. Last and strongest argument of all, in a city where there are many popolari or m ediocri, it would be violenza to subject them to the authority of the grandi.91 The rest of Book h i is taken up with the anatomy of an ideal con­ stitution. W e know that this is to be a governo misto, owing much of its detail to Venice, and satisfying the aspirations, b y combining the powers, of those who desire grandezza, onore, and liberta. T h e powers of each group are to be interdependent, but there is to be one— the power of those whose aim is liberta, namely the people— which pre­ ponderates, at least in the sense of being less dependent on the other two than they are on it; but there has also been mention of four pow ­ ers or functions which constitute the vigore or nervo of government and belong to whatever individual or group is to be signore. T o mod­ ern readers, this signore sounds very like a sovereign, and a sovereign does not seem to fit into the balanced distribution of powers which constitutes a governo misto, even of the weighted kind which Gian­ notti has in view. W e have a problem, therefore, and perhaps Giannotti had too, in relating these concepts to one another. Giannotti begins by declaring that the republic is to be composed of three principal members, but that, just as in Venice, there is to be a fourth, called the Collegio, to go between the senate and the gonfalo­ niere (or prince) and satisfy the aspirations of those who seek gran­ dezza b y associating them as closely as possible with the supreme 89 Opere, n, no: “ Quanto al leggerle, cosi le puo leggere un popolare come un grande; e la pratica non veggio maggiore nell’una parte che nell’altra . . .” 90 Opere, n, 1 1 1 : “ . . . perche i popolari fanno molto maggiore numero che i grandi, si puo probabilmente dire che facciano maggiore aggregato di prudenza . . .” 91 Opere, n, i i 6.

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authority which only one man can exercise.92 The members of this Collegio are to be magistrates rather than counselors, in the sense that specialized functions in regard of war (the T en ), justice (the procura­ torz), and so on, are to be assigned to each of them; and it is assumed that they excel in respect not only of ambition, but also of intellectual qualities, perhaps including experience, but certainly extending to origi­ nality, initiative, and the ability to propose policies. If at this end of the scale there is to be overlap between the one and the few , between grandezza and onore, at the other end the Consiglio Grande, though its function is to preserve liberta and therefore to represent the popolari who look no higher, is to be open to all citizens, whether grandi, m ediocri, or popolari, whether (w e may add) they seek grandezza, onore, or liberta. It is in fact to be composed of citizens reckoned as equals and by number. Giannotti goes on to explain w h y there will be a category of plebei who find no place in the Consiglio because they are not members of the city; their trades are vile and they are foreign­ ers with homes to go to (he may have in mind peasants from the sur­ rounding villages). But he insists at some length that those who pay taxes, but are not eligible for magistracies, must be members of the Consiglio Grande.93 Since it seems to have been the experience of the militia of 1528-1530 which convinced him of the need to treat these non-beneficiati as citizens, it is interesting, and possibly significant of the w ay his thought was turning, that the arguments he now deploys are stressed as being operative when the city is not armed, no less than when it is. If the non-beneficiati— he is now calling them popolari— are not admitted to onori (membership of the Consiglio is plainly an onore), they will not love the republic or voluntarily contribute to or defend it; they will be liable to follow particular leaders; and these dangers w ill be exacerbated in time of arms. Aristotle would certainly 92 Opere, 11, 117: “Per il consiglio adunque si soddisfa al desiderio della liberta; per il senato all’appetito dell’onore; per il principe al desiderio del principato. Resta di trovar modo di soddisfare a chi appetisce grandezza, non potendo piu che uno ottenere il principato. Bisogna adunque collocare un membro tra il senato ed il principe, e questo sara un aggregato d’alcuni magistrati, i quali col principe consiglieranno, ed eseguiranno le faccende grandi dello stato e della citta . . . e questo membro si puo chiamare, se vogliamo imitare i Veneziani, il collegio.” 93 Opere, 11, 118: “II consiglio grande essere un aggregato composto di quei tre membri, i quali noi di sopra descriveremmo, cioe grandi, mediocri e popolari; de’ plebei non occorre far menzione, come ancora di sopra dicemmo, essendo gente forestiera che vengono alia citta per valersi delle fatiche corporali, e ne vanno a casa loro, qualunque volta torna loro a proposito. Quelli che io chiamai popolari (cioe quelli che sono a gravezza, ma non sono abili a’ magistrati) e necessario connumerare in detto consiglio, perche sono poco meno che principal membro della citta per fare grandissimo numero, e per non potere la citta senza quelli stare, e per mantenere la sua grandezza.”

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condemn both Venice and Florence for failure to mobilize this class in citizenship;94 and Giannotti is plainly aware that not membership in the Consiglio alone, but all forms of magistracy and onore, should be open to them, though he concedes that this may not be practicable as things are. There is no one who is not ambitious of exaltation and glory, he says, unless repressed and debased as the French have been; and the arming of a city serves to bring this truth to the surface.95 A t this stage the class of those, once called popolari, who desire liberta alone would seem to have disappeared, but perhaps it would be truer to say that it has become open-ended: it is a category to which all men may, and to some extent do, belong, but this is in no w ay incompatible with the existence of a constant competition in virtu, from which governing elites emerge and in which all citizens may take part. Giannotti is as hostile as Guicciardini to the imposition of qualifications of wealth or birth for membership in the higher magistracies. He now explicitly declares that the Consiglio Grande is to be signore of the city and consequently must exercise those “ functions which are sovereign in the republic and embrace all the power of the state.” 96 W e ask ourselves how such a monopoly can be reconciled with a mere lessening of dependence in a structure of interdependence. T he func­ tions or powers in question, we recall, are the election of magistrates, the determination of peace and war, the hearing of appeals and the approval and promulgation of new laws. Giannotti is able to explain a modified version of Venetian procedure w hereby the Consiglio elects all magistrates, from the senate up through the Collegio to the G on­ faloniere. The last is to be elected for life, but the senate, he decides after consideration— and contrary to his opinion in the Letter to Cap94 Opere, n, 119-20: . . di qui nasce che i popolari amano piu molte volte un privato che la repubblica, e per lui prendere l’armi contro alia patria, sperando avere ad esse da quello arricchiti ed onorati. . . . Appresso, se Aristotile, il quale ha trattato con tanta dottrina e sapienza de’ governi di tutte le repubbliche, entrasse in Venezia o in Firenze, dove vedesse d’una gran moltitudine d’uomini non esser tenuto conto alcuno, salvo che ne’ bisogni della citta, senza dubbio si riderebbe di tali ordinazioni, avendo nel settimo libro della sua Politica distribuiti gli ufficii della citta convenienti a tutte le qualita degli abitanti della medesima.” 95 Opere, 11, 120-21: “E se alcuno dicesse che questi popolari non sono ambiziosi . . . questo curarsi (poco?) de’ magistrati non e naturale, ma accidente, perche non e uomo si misero che non desideri essere esaltato. Ma perche questi popolari sono stati tenuti bassi dalla superbia dei grandi, percio son divenuti non ambiziosi, siccome ancora ne’ tempi nostri sono i Franzesi, i quali per essere stati sbattuti dalla nobilta loro, sono divenuti vilissimi. Non essendo adunque naturale tal vilta di animo in questi popolari, non e da privarli de’ magistrati, e massimamente perche armandosi la citta, diverriano subito desiderosi di gloria come gli altri . . .” 96 Opere, 11, 122: “ . . . azioni le quali sono principali nella repubblica ed abbracciano tutta la forza dello stato.”

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poni— is to be reelected every year, with no bar to the serving of suc­ cessive terms; this will ensure a stable elite, in which it will however be possible to lose one’s place.97 But the determination of peace and war must terminate in the senate . . . and though it cannot pass to the Consiglio, it will nevertheless depend upon the latter since this is where the senate in which it terminates is elected. It might perhaps be well, when a new war is proposed for the first time, to refer the decision to the Consiglio Grande, as did the Romans, who used to ask the people if it was their will and com­ mand that war be made on this or that prince or republic; but all consequent decisions (accidenti) must terminate in the senate.98 Similarly the power of hearing appeals must terminate in a special­ ized body of magistrates, imitated from the Venetians, called the Quarantie. Giannotti subsequently remarks that the signore of a state or city, whose proprietd this power rightfully is, often finds that it takes up too much of his time to exercise it in person (one suspects that it was also the problem of time which made Giannotti withhold the accidenti of war from the Consiglio), and for this reason the Consiglio Grande which is signore of Venice has set up the Quarantie, and the king of France has deputed his judicial power to four parlements It is arguable, then, that the power of election safeguards the dependenza of the judicial as of the military power upon the Consiglio. The difficulty is the vigor with which Giannotti earlier contended that a city might be free— i.e., that its Consiglio might be supreme— in respect of the election of magistrates but unfree in respect of the w ay those 97 Opere, n, 129-30. 98 Opere, 11, 123: “Le deliberazioni della pace e guerra abbiano a terminare nel senato . . . e quantunque elle non passino nel consiglio, avranno pure da lui la dependenza, essendo da quello il senato, dove l’hanno a terminare, eletto . . . Saria forse bene, quando si ha a muovere una guerra di nuovo, vincere questa prima deliberazione nel consiglio grande (siccome facevano i Romani, i quali domandavano il popolo, se volevano e comandavano che si movesse guerra a questo ed a quello altro principe o repubblica); dipoi tutti gli accidenti di essa avessero a terminare nel senato.” 99 Opere, 11, 157: “ . . . e da notare che questo atto dell’ascoltare le provocazioni pare che sia proprieta di quello che e signore dello stato e della citta: ma perche chi e signore, o egli non vuole, o egli non puo se non con difficolta tal cosa eseguire, percio vediamo tale uffizio essere attribuito ad un altro giudizio dagli altri separato. Laonde perche in Francia il re non vuole, ed anco con difficolta potria occuparsi in tal faccenda, sono ordinati quattro parlamenti, i quali odono e giudicano le provocazioni di tutto il regno. In Venezia, perche il consiglio grande, che e signore di tutta la repubblica, non puo fare tale effetto, perche bisogneria che stesse tutto l’anno occupato in tal materia (il che saria impossibile rispetto alle faccende private) sono ordinate tre quarantie . . .” 3H

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magistrates exercised their power, and that it was precisely this, in relation to military and judicial matters, which had made the republics of 1494 and 1527 violent and unfree governments. It was insufficient to keep— as Giannotti’s plan continues to keep— the final approval of legislation in the power of the Consiglio, since legislation was not thought of as regulating the military and judicial functions. It is possible to m odify what seems a theoretical failure on Gian­ notti’s part by pointing out that the former magistrates’ irresponsi­ bility had consisted in his view not only in their independence of con­ trol b y the Consiglio Grande, but also in the fact that the same men proposed, resolved upon, and executed policies.100 This alone had suf­ ficed to make them closed cliques of the self-seeking, and he now takes up again his earlier proposals to separate consultazione and delibera­ zione and in this w ay to make men functionally responsible to each other. He effected this b y detailing the relations between the senate and the various boards composing the Collegio, and he is able (as in the Letter to Capponi) to use the terms “ few ” to denote the body, e.g., the Ten, which exercises consultazione, and “ many” to denote the senate which resolves on their proposals.101 Yet as long as military and judicial matters do not reach the Consiglio, the term “ m any” can­ not carry its usual meaning, and as long as the election of magistrates is thought of as one among four powers, and not as a prior and sepa­ rate determinant of the other three, such a Consiglio cannot qualify as a signore exercising all four; but that is the only definition of signore which we have. It can of course be argued— and this is much more plausible— that if the Consiglio elects the senate, the Collegio, and the Gonfaloniere, it exercises indirect control over those two of the four powers which do not remain under its immediate authority, and is therefore very much less dependent on the one and the few than they are on it. But the problem throughout has been the relation between the concept of lesser dependenza and that of signore, and the two cannot be said to have been reconciled, much less identified. If we take Giannotti’s theory of the signore and its four powers as a primitive attempt at a theory o f sovereignty, we m ay add that the linguistic con­ fusions which arose when one spoke of sovereignty in a context of mixed government, and vice versa, were to bedevil political discourse to the Am erican Revolution and beyond. Giannotti’s mind was independent, forceful, and original, but lacked the unpredictable creativity of genius which we find in Machiavelli; and for this reason it m ay be taken as displaying in some detail the bent 100 See his criticisms of the arrangements made in 1502, 1512, and 1527 at pp. 140-41.

101 See generally pp. 139-47, and particularly 144-45.

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and the limitations of humanist political thought. His chief originality consists in his perception that virtu in a mixed government was a kind of power, and in his consequent attempt to define the four functions of government whose location determined the signore. But he failed to concentrate these functions and was obliged to distribute them instead; and the ultimate reason was that humanist political thought was overmasteringly concerned with the ideal of civic virtue as an attribute of the personality, and in the last resort always turned from the establishment of institutionalized authority to the establishment of conditions, termed liberta, in which virtue might have free play and escape corruption. Our analysis of the Repubblica Fiorentina, like that of the Discorsi, should close with its distinctive contribution to the theory of corruption: Giannotti condemns the w ay in which, under the Savonarolan regime of 1529-1530, the brethren of San Marco became involved in politics and ambitious politicians sought conspicu­ ous association with them as a means to enhanced authority with the citizens. This, he says, was no less corruption than was the open bribery o f voters at Rom e— it was, so to speak, an attempt to buy authority with coin other than that existing for the purpose— and to make things worse, bribery was at least acknowledged to be an evil, whereas if you attacked hypocrisy you were taken for an enemy of Jesus Christ.102 Humanist political thought excelled at this sort of analysis, and sub­ ordinated the consideration of power to it; liberty, virtue, and corrup­ tion, rather than the location of authority, were its prime concerns. It is not even certain that Machiavelli was an exception. As we com­ plete this study of the last phase of Florentine political theory, the most vivid impression remaining should be that of the continuity of a basically Aristotelian republicanism from which Machiavelli did not seem to his friends (who were each other’s enemies) to have greatly departed. Certainly we can discover areas of his thought where he seems to have radically departed from the medieval concept of a teleologically determined human nature, though equally there are moments at which he seems to be using, if he does not form ally reason from, the idea that men are formed to be citizens and that the reformation of their natures in that direction m ay be corrupted but cannot be i ° 2 Opere, 11, 194-99; especially p. 196: “ Q uesto m odo di vivere che tengono questi che fanno professione di religione, conversando coi frati di San M arco e continuando simulatamente l’orazione e la com unione, senza dubbio e pessimo nella nostra citta; perche egli fa il medesimo effetto che facevano in R om a le largizioni. M a questi e ancora m olto peggiore, perche dove le largizioni si potevano in qualche m odo correggere, a questa cosi fatta vita con difficolta si trova rim edio; perche chi ragionasse di proibire questi m odi di vivere, parrebbe che volesse vietare agli uom ini il bene operare, e sarebbe ributtato non altrimenti che un pessimo nem ico nella fede di C risto.”

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reversed; the prince cannot make them anything else. But it is of some significance that the revolutionary aspects of his thinking— those in which man appears most dynamic and least natural— did not arrest the attention of his friends. Guicciardini’s concept of citizenship remains a concept of virtu, loaded in the midst of its realism with Aristotelian language and assumptions, and in Giannotti the principle that man’s nature is that of a citizen is explicitly stated, explicitly Aristotelian, and stops short only of becoming Savonarolan. It was in the Aristotelian and civic humanist channel that the stream of republican tradition was to flow, and Machiavelli as a historical figure, to whom theorists like Harrington and Adams referred, was to swim quite successfully in that channel. And the tradition to which the Florentines belonged was to be supported rather than impeded b y their tough-mindedness in retain­ ing a basically moralist concern with liberty and corruption; it con­ tinued to present politics as the erection of conditions under which men might freely exercise active virtue. Giannotti also reveals to us the high capacity of Aristotelian politi­ cal science, as an analytical and explicatory system, to absorb theories put forw ard as variations on its basic ideas. The Polybian theory of cycles, Machiavelli’s doctrine of the militia, the model (rather than the m yth) of Venice— all these are alluded to, explored, but finally used rather than followed; and they are used in the service of a basically Aristotelian method of categorizing the elements composing a city and showing how their interactions lead to stability, instability, or change in the polity. The classical republicanism to which John Adams still adhered was basically a Renaissance rephrasing of the political science set forth in Aristotle’s Politics, and it possessed a high degree of capac­ ity for dealing with the social phenomena of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For Giannotti, however, perhaps its main impor­ tance was its ability to provide causal explanations of particular hap­ penings and particular characteristics of cities; the Repubblica Fiorentina, is after all, a partially successful attempt to show how Venetian procedures and their underlying principles can be used in devising a different style of government for the very different conditions obtain­ ing at Florence; and we have seen how, using Aristotelian categories both of causation and political composition, he was able to construct historical explanations and predictions concerning Florentine condi­ tions which may have been misleading, but nevertheless dispelled much of the sense of m ystery surrounding the particular. He is less dependent on concepts of usage, providence, or fortuna, when it comes to explain­ ing how Florence has come to be as she is or what she may expect in the future, than either Savonarola or Machiavelli; he does not expect a miracle, like the form er or his epigoni in 1529-1530— he has seen what 3i7

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their faith could and could not do— and he has less than the latter’s sense of the desperate difficulty of creative action in the face of fo r­ tuna, or the almost miraculous qualities required for its success. This no doubt has much to do with his choice of a rational Venice, rather than a dynamic Rome, as the source of his principles of organization.103 His theory is highly articulated and he is relatively confident of its applicability in practice. Guicciardini, had he ever read the Repubblica Fiorentina, would have acidly remarked that its author had never had to put his theories into effect; and certainly it is sad, as one reads Giannotti’s demonstra­ tions that the regime of the early 1530s cannot possibly last, to reflect that this intelligent man had forty more years of life in which to see himself proved w rong (Guicciardini was just as wrong about the same regime in his own w a y ). But in the present study we are concerned less with the predictive capacity of ideas than with their capacity to enlarge the paradigmatic vocabulary of a civilization; in this sense, an unsuccessful prophecy can be reused. Giannotti found Aristotelian political analysis complex and plausible enough to give him confidence that he understood something of the w ay things happened in time, and for this reason his thought is not focused on apocalyptic expectation, like Savonarola’s, or on innovazione and occasione like Machiavelli’s. Tim e is not in the foreground. The w ork concludes— as do II Principe and the Dialogo del Reggim ento di Firenze— with what we can now see as an almost conventional section104 on the problems of actualiza­ tion. Like Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Giannotti reviews the occa­ sions on which, and the personalities b y whom, republics m ay be securely founded; but his thought is directed toward Florentine actual­ ity, and the fact that he writes as an exile in time of tyranny leaves him, as he recognizes, very little to say. O nly a liberator (like Andrea Doria at Genoa) can be legislator for Florence, and concerning a lib­ erator we can say only that either he will come or he will not. Others— presumably including Machiavelli— have written so well on the theory of conjurations and conspiracies as to teach him all he can learn about the occasione of the overthrow of governments; our part is to study 103 But cf. Opere, 11, 255-56: “Conchiudendo adunque dico che tal forma di repubblica della nostra citta non potrebbe patire alcuna intrinseca alterazione: e per virtu della milizia nel sopradetto modo ordinata, si difenderebbe dagli assalti esterni, e se la fortuna concedesse a questa repubblica colle sue armi armata una sola vittoria, acquisterebbe la nostra citta sola tanta gloria e reputazione che toccherebbe il cielo; e non saria maraviglia alcuna se Firenze diventasse un’altra Roma, essendo il subbietto per la frequenza e natura degli abitatori, e fortezza del sito, d’un imperio grandissimo capace.” A t this point Giannotti is drawing nearer to both the Savonarolan and the Machiavellian modes of thinking. 104Book hi, ch. 8 (the last); pp. 258-69.

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the theory of establishing them, since it is better that we should com­ plain of Fortune that she never sent us a liberator, than she of us that we did not know what to do when he came.105 In these concluding words of his treatise, Giannotti accepts the role of the theorist in exile, and indicates once more that his attitude to time and fortuna is realistic. He is not naive about the difficulties of action, neither does he think them capable only of a miraculous solution (Machiavelli, who has been accused of the former, is nearer to the latter position). W hen he acknowledges the prim acy of fortuna, he means only that there are always things beyond our control. If this is largely the reason w hy Giannotti prefers Venice to Rome, and does not adopt Machiavelli’s concept of a dynamic virtii, it is also a reason w h y he does not present Venice as a miracle or a myth. The problem of time was not, to his mind, such that only a Venetian mira­ cle could solve it. He accepted the view that the purpose of legisla­ tion— and of his own planning for Florence— was to found constitu­ tions that would endure, and he profoundly admired V enice’s success in achieving near-perpetual stability. But the components of the mito di Venezia were the belief that only miraculous wisdom could bring such stability, and the belief that Venice had achieved a miracle by the art and contrivance of many; and since Giannotti did not adopt the former position, he presented neither a Polybian balance nor the m ys­ teries of Venetian electoral machinery as constituting a miraculous solution to the problem of duration. He was obliged to see V enice’s success as the product of many causes, simply b y the circumstance that he was applying Venetian paradigms to the problem of achieving the same success in the very different conditions of Florence, and his mainly Aristotelian vocabulary gave him so many w ays of differen­ tiating conditions and causes that he could not see the problem as apocalyptic or its solution as miraculous or simple. T he problem of legislation for durability was capable of complex solutions, and these could be built up over time. In both Giannotti’s major works, his account of Venetian history, while serving as a kind of antithesis to 105 Opere, n, 269: “Saria ben necessario esser accorto nel prender l’occasione; perche questa e quella che ha le bilance delle faccende umane e tutte quelli che in tal cosa non usano prudenza grandissima sono costretti a rovinare. Ma di questa materia non e da parlare, perche appartiene delle congiure, la quale e stata da altri prudentissimamente trattata. “Conchiudendo adunque dico che questi sono i modi per i quali alcun cittadino potria recare si gran beneflzio alia nostra citta; e benche la malignita della fortuna abbia oppressati quelli che hanno questi modi seguitati, non e pero da disperare . . . acciocche la citta nostra s’abbia piu tosto a lamentare della fortuna per non avere mostrato mai alcuna intera occasione, che ella della citta, per non v ’essere stato chi l’abbia saputa conoscere e pigliare.”

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Machiavelli’s history of Rome, is equally an account of a complex his­ torical process. But we have seen that republican theory is in essence Aristotelian political science, selectively simplified b y a drastic emphasis on the problem of time. It was possible to move aw ay from such an emphasis, into a conceptual world so rich in its vocabulary that the potentialities of action increased and the problem of time grew less. But it was equally possible to move in the reverse direction, toward a position where only divine grace, the heroic action of a Lycurgus, or the attain­ ment of a miraculous equilibrium seemed to offer solutions to the prob­ lem. T h e Renaissance obsession with time and fortune ensured that, since Venice was the paradigm of the solution last mentioned, the mito di Venezia would endure; and if Giannotti’s nonmythical account became one of the standard books in the literature of the m ito, it is valuable to study the contemporary and no less w idely read treatise of Gasparo Contarini, in which the mythical element is far more pronounced.

[m] Contarini, a Venetian aristocrat and churchman, wrote his De Magistratibus et Republica Venetorum at an uncertain time106 during the twenties and thirties of the sixteenth century, and it was printed only in 1543, after which it became a book of European reputation and was many times reprinted. Though its renown exceeded that of Giannotti’s Repubblica de’ Veneziani, it is a w ork of rather less inten­ sive and technical character as far as its treatment of the Venetian magistracies and their history is concerned; but it is completed where Giannotti’s treatise is incomplete, and Contarini has found space to state his philosophy of government as relevant to the Venetian theme. Since his book had a traceable impact in many countries, it is of some value to quote it in the English of its Elizabethan translation, the w ork of Lewes Lewkenor, which appeared in 1599. Contarini’s language is panegyrical from the start: he states that Venice appears, both physically and politically, “ rather framed b y the hands of the immortal Gods, than any w ay by the arte, industry or inuention of men.” 107 But it is a crucial point with him that Venice 106 Perhaps 152 2 -2 5 . See G ilbert, “ D ate o f the Com position,” loc. cit. (above, n. 3 ). 107 L ew k en o r, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice. Written by the Cardinall Gasper Contareno and translated oat of Italian into English by Lewes Lewkenor (Lon don , 159 9 ), p. 2. T h e Latin text runs (Contarini, De Magis­ tratibus et Republica Venetorum, Paris, 1543, p. 1 ) : “ . . . deorum im m ortalium

potius quam hom inum opus atque inuentu fuisse . . .”

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is the w ork of human art and above all of human virtue. Follow ing a line of thought opened up b y the Florentines, but becoming usual with Venetian writers, he states that virtue may appear in either a civil or a m ilitary form, but that although the latter is glorious and necessary it must exist only for the sake of the former. He is in the mainstream of Aristotelian and Christian thought in insisting that the end of war must be peace, but as an Italian writing in the civic humanist tradition he has also to explain how it is that Venetian virtu involves the employ­ ment of mercenaries while the citizens remain unarmed themselves. T o Lewkenor, who furnished his own commentary b y w ay of introduc­ tion, this paradox— and it seemed one to him no less than to a Floren­ tine— was part of the generally miraculous w ay in which Venetian political procedures controlled, both rationally and morally, all depart­ ments of civic life. Besides, what is there that can carrie a greater disproportion with common rules of experience, the that unweaponed men in gownes should with such happinesse o f successe give direction & law to many mightie and warlike armies . . . and long robed citizens to bee serued, yea and sued unto for entertainment by the greatest princes and peers of Italy; amidst which infinit affluence of glorie, and unmeasurable mightinesse of power, of which there are in soueraignty partakers aboue 3000 gentlemen, yet is there not one among them to bee found that doth aspire to any greater appellation of honour. . . .108 Contarini does not go quite as far as his translator, though he does explain later that, because the civil constitution o f Venice grew up under conditions of separation from the terra firma and therefore from m ilitary life— like most writers on these questions, he does not regard maritime power as posing any problems for civil organization— when the city finally became a land power, it was thought better not to let citizens exercise military commands for fear that this their continual frequentation of the continent, and diuorcement as it were from the ciuile life, would without doubt haue brought forth a kinde of faction different and disioyned from the other peaceable Citizens, which parcialitie and dominion would in time have bred ciuile warres and dissentions within the City. . . . T o exclude therefore out of our estate the danger or occasion of anv such ambitious enterprises, our auncestors held it a better course to defend their dominions vppon the continent, with forreign mercenarie souldiers, than with their homeborn citizens, & to assigne them 108 Lewkenor, sig. A3.

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their pay & stipende out of the tributes and receipts of the Prouince, wherein they remayned. . . ,109 But he does not mean that military and civic virtue are necessarily incompatible, or that it is the mechanized routine of decision at Venice which keeps the former subordinate to the latter. This is the w ork of virtue, and of a virtue which Contarini depicts as inherent in the Vene­ tian aristocracy as a whole. In a passage which a knowledge of Floren­ tine thought greatly illuminates, he bases this assertion on the familiar themes that Venice has never had a legislator, that a legislator has a difficult task with those less virtuous than himself, and that there is little historical evidence preserved concerning the city’s early history. Giannotti had been puzzled to account for the creation of stable orders b y the early Venetians’ unaided intelligence, but to Contarini the m ys­ tery is to be proudly affirmed rather than explained. There were in Athens, Lacedaemon and R om e, in sundry seasons sundry rare and vertuous men of excellent desert and singular pietie towards their country, but so fewe, that being ouerruled b y the multitude they were not able much to profit the same. But our auncestors, from whome wee have receyued so flourishing a common­ wealth, all in one did vnite themselues in a consenting desire to estab­ lish, honour and amplifie their country, without hauing in a manner any the least regarde of their owne priuate glorie or commodity. And this any man may easily coniecture . . . in regarde that there are in Venice to bee found none, or very few monuments of our auncestors, though both at home and abroad many things were by them gloriously atchieued, and they of passing and singular desert towards their countrie. There are no stately tombes erected, no military stat­ ues remaining, no stemmes of ships, no ensignes, no standards taken from their enemies, after the victory of many and mighty battailes. . . .110 109Lewkenor, p. 130. Contarini, pp. 100-101: “ Haec vero frequens consuetudo cotinentis, ac intermissio urbanae, factione quandam ciuium paritura facile fuerat ab aliis ciuibus disiuncta: quapropter proculdubio res Veneta breui ad factiones et ad bella ciuilia deducta fuisset. . . . Ne ergo huiusmodi quispiam morbus in Venetam ciuitatem obreperet, satius esse maiores statuerunt, ut continentis imperium externo ac conducto milite quam Veneto defenderetur. Stipendlu uero illi statuit ex uectigalibus totius prouinciae. Aequu enim erat eius regionis impensis militem uiuere, qui ad earn tuendam accersitus fu erat. . 110 Lewkenor, p. 6. Contarini, pp. 5-6: “Fuere Athenis, Lacedaemone, ac Romae nonulli ciues uitae probitate, atq: in Rempub. pietate insignes uiri, sed adeo pauci, ut multitudine obruti, non multum patriae rei profuerint. A t maiores nostri, a quibus tam praeclaram Rempub. accepimus, omnes ad unum consensere in studio patriae rei firmandae et amplificandae, nulla prope priuati commodi et honoris

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W ith this then exceeding vertue of mind did our auncestors plant and settle this such a commonwealth, that since the memory of man, whosoeuer shal go about to make compare between the same & the noblest of the ancients, shal scarcely find any such: but rather I dare affirme, that in the discourses of those great Philosophers, which fashioned and forged commonwealths according to the desires of the mind, there is not any to be founde so well fayned and framed. . . .1X1 T o Florentine theorists it was evident that ambition and the pursuit of onore and chiarezza motivated any civic aristocracy, and that a prob­ lem in government was to prevent this thirst from corrupting itself. Giannotti considered the need to give it the appearance of satisfaction, while rendering that satisfaction dependent on the concurrence of others, one of the necessities that kept governo misto a second best, appropriate to an imperfect world. But if Contarini is prepared to endow the Venetians with virtue in the full sense of a disregard of all except the public good, then the governo misto of Venice must be much less a contrivance against corruption, much more an expression of its absence. W hen he proceeds to state his philosophy o f govern­ ment, it involves the usual case against the simple rule of the one, the few or the many, but on grounds less close to Polybius than to the main lines of Christian Aristotelian politics. As beasts are governed by men, so should men be governed b y that which is higher than man. God does not govern commonwealths directly, but there is in man an element of the divine, which is “ the mind, pure and devoid of perturba­ tion” ; a long w ay from Giannotti’s conception of virtu. Since there are also in man “ inferior and brutish powers,” we cannot ensure the rule of the mind b y entrusting government to any man, group or com­ bination of groups of men, but “ by a certaine diuine counsell when b y other meanes it might not, mankinde through the inuention of lawes seemeth to have attained this point, that the office of gouerning assem­ blings of men should be giuen to the mind and reason onely. . . .” 112 habita ratione. Huiusce rei coniecturam facere quiuis facile poterit . . . q: nulla, aut admodu pauca antiquoru monumeta Venetiis extent: alioquin domi forisq: praeclarissimorum hominu, et qui de Rep. bene meriti fuerint, non sepulchra, no equestres aut pedestres statua, no rostra nauiu, aut uexilla ab hostibus direpta, ingentibus praeliis superatis.” 111 Lewkenor, p. 7. Contarini, p. 6: “ Hac ergo incredibili uirtute animi maiores nostri hanc Remp. instituere, quale post hominu memoriam nullam extitisse, si quis hac nostram cum celeberrimis antiquorum coferar, meridiana luce clarius intuebitur. Quin adfirmare ausim, neq: monumentis insignium philosophorum, qui pro animi uoto Reip. formas effinxere, tam recte formatam atq: effictam ullam contineri.” 1 12 Lewkenor, p. n . Contarini, pp. 8-9: “ . . . menti purae, ac motionum animi

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If laws can attain the status of pure reason— the apocryphal author­ ity of Aristotle is given for the view “ that God was the same in the vniuersity of things, as an ancient lawe in a civill company” 113— then laws must rule and not men; the participation of individuals and groups in government is subordinate to this. But the argument is in danger of becoming circular: laws ensure that reason rules and not particular passions, but they are invented and maintained by men and can prevail only when men are guided by reason to the public good and not by passion to private ends. T he laws must maintain themselves, then, by regulating the behavior of the men who maintain them; and in “ assem­ blings of men,” in cities, that is to say, where men regularly meet face to face to enforce and make laws and to transact public business, the term “ laws” must have the principal meaning of a set o f orders and regulations for the conduct of assemblies and the framing of decisions. Such laws must have the effect of directing men’s energies solely toward the public good, which is to say solely in the paths of pure reason. The mito di Venezia consists in the assertion that Venice pos­ sesses a set of regulations for decision-making which ensure the com­ plete rationality of every decision and the complete virtue of every decision-maker. Venetians are not inherently more virtuous than other men, but they possess institutions which make them so. A n individual in whom pure mind always reigned, without the need for external controls or assistance, would as we know be an angel rather than a man. As Hobbes’s Leviathan was an “ artificial man” and a “ mortal god,” so Contarini’s Venice, it may be suggested, was an arti­ ficial angel: men who were not w holly rational functioned as members of an institutional fram ework which was. Lewkenor seems to have sensed this: beholde their great Councell, consisting at the least of 3000 Gentle­ men, whereupon the highest strength and mightinesse of the estate absolutely relyeth, notwithstanding which number all thinges are ordered with so diuine a peaceableness, and so without all tumult and confusion, that it rather seemeth to bee an assembly of Angels, then of men. immuni id munus conferendum est. Quamobrem diuino quodam consilio, cum alia ratione id fieri non posset, inuentibus legibus hoc assecutum humanum genus uidetur, ut menti tantum ac rationi nullis perturbantibus obnoxiae, hoc regendi hominum coetus officium demandatum sit . . .” 113 Lewkenor, p. 12. Contarini, pp. 9-10: “ Aristoteles philosophorum facile princeps, in eo libello que de mundo ad Alexandrum regem Macedonum scripsit, nihil aliud reperit cui similem deum optimum faceret, praeter antiquam legem in ciuitate recte instituta: ut id propemodum tam magni philosophi sententia sit deus in hac rerum universitate, quod antiqua lex in ciuili societate.”

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. . . their penall Lawes most unpardonably executed; their encour­ agements to vertue infinite; especially b y their distribution of offices and dignities, which is ordered in such a secrete, straunge, and intri­ cate sort, that it utterly ouerreacheth the subtiltie of all ambitious practises, neuer falling upon any but upon such as are b y the whole assembly allowed for greatest wisedome, vertue and integritie of life. . . . there are sundry other so maruellous and miraculous considera­ tions, and in their owne exceeding singularitie, beyond all resem­ blance or comparison with any other Commonwealth so unspeakeablie straunge, that their wonderfull rarenesse being verified, maketh the straungest impossibilities not seeme altogether incredible. . . ,114 T o an Elizabethan mind, Venice could appear a phenomenon of political science fiction: a series of marvelous devices for keeping men virtuous, where in other states this was left to individual reason or divine grace. Contarini, who was after all a churchman, does not press the language of m ystery and miracle so far, but he has endowed his Venetians with exceptional virtue by whose means they have evolved political procedures which maintain it. Inevitably, the theoretical lan­ guage he adopts obliges him to present virtue as the maintenance of a balance between the one, the few, and the many; these are the cate­ gories into which persons fall and which must consequently be tran­ scended if an impersonal government is to be maintained. But in his ideal constitution it is the laws which rule, and the distribution of authority between one, few , and many is a means of keeping all three subject to law and reason: yet is the multitude of itselfe unapt to governe, unlesse the same be in some sort combined together; for there cannot bee a multitude without the same bee in some vnitie contayned; so that the ciuill society (w hich consisteth in a certain vnity) will bee dissolued, if the multitude become not one b y some meane of reason. . . ,115 T he language reveals that older philosophical traditions are directing and binding the simpler formulae of mixed government. W e do indeed read, shortly after this, that Venice has combined the princely, noble, and popular forms of authority “ so that the formes of them all seeme 114 Lewkenor, sig. A 2V.-3. 115 Lewkenor, p. 13. Contarini, p. 11: “ Ac equidem multitudo omnis est per se inepta gubernationi, nisi in unum quodammodo coalescat: quandoquidem neque esse ulla multitudo queat, nisi unitate aliqua contineatur. Qua de re ciuilis quoque societas dissipabitur, quae unitate quadam costat, nisi quapiam ratione multitudo unum efficiatur.”

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to be equally balanced, as it were with a paire of weights . . . ,” 116 but it is not a question of distinguishing political functions as distinct modes o f power, and ascribing them to the one, few , and many so as to form a balance. This raised, as w e have seen, the problem of explaining just how one mode of power could be said to “ balance” another; Giannotti had decided that the question could not be resolved in those terms and would have to be rephrased (a task in which he had not been very successful), but Contarini, writing apparently without knowledge of the Florentine’s w ork,117 m ay be found at one point repudiating the very language in which Giannotti had restated it. there cannot happen to a commonwealth a more daungerous or pestilent contagion, then the ouerweighing of one parte or faction aboue the other: for where the ballance of iustice standeth not euen, it is vnpossible that there should bee a friendly societie and firme agreement among the citizens: which alwaies happeneth where m any offices of the commonwealth meete together in one. For as every mixture dissolueth, if any one of the elementes (of which the mixed body consisteth) ouercome the other: and as in musicke the tune is marred where one string keepeth a greater noyse than hee should doe: so b y the like reason, if you will haue your common­ wealth perfect and enduring, let not one part bee mightier than the other, but let them all (in as much as may bee) have equall share in the publique authoritie.118 Read in conjunction with Giannotti, this may seem a simple reces­ sion to the theory of Polybian balance; but there is rather more to it than that. The context in which it occurs is that of a provision which forbids more than three members of a fam ily holding office in the senate at any one time, so that the “ partes or factions” which must not overbalance one another are not merely the traditional Polybian three, but might include any grouping whatever into which the citizens might fall. Polybian theory, we remember yet again, was a paradig­ 116 Lewkenor, p. 15. Contarini, p. 13: . . adeo ut omnium formas pari quadam librameto commiscuisse uideatur . . 117 Gilbert, “Date of the Composition,” pp. 172-74, 182. 118 Lewkenor, p. 67. Contarini, p. 53: “Nam nulla perniciosior pestis in Rempublicam obrepserit, q[uam] si quaepia eius pars caeteris praeualuerit. Sic nanque (?) quoniam ius non seruatur, impossibile est societatem inter ciues consistere. Quod usu euenire solet ubicunque plura in unum conueniunt. Sic soluitur mixtum, si quodpia elementoru ex quibus constat, alia superauerit. Sic omnis consonantia dissonans sit, si fidem seu uocem una plus intenderis quam par sit. Non dispari ratione si ciuitatem aut Rempublicam constare uolueris, necesse est id in primis seruari, ne qua pars aliis efficiatur potentior, sed omnes, quoad fieri possit, participes fiat publicae potestatis.” 326

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matic simplification of Aristotelian political science, and Aristotle had known well enough that the one, few , and many were categories which it was convenient and necessary to employ. A durable constitution must satisfy all social groups; a one-few-many analysis was merely an operationally satisfactory means of ascertaining whether it was doing so. But Contarini, far more than Giannotti, is self-consciously a philoso­ pher in politics; and where the Florentine developed the concept of virtu in the direction of power, the Venetian retained it primarily with the connotation of rationality. Government was an act of wisdom directed at the common good, so that “ equall share in the publique authoritie” meant, among other things, “ equal share in the exercise of public intelligence.” But a body politic in which every conceivable part or category exercised the mode of intelligence appropriate to it would be one whose rationality was perfect, and participation in its public intelligence would also be perfect. It is not insignificant that from the beginnings of the m ito, Venetian mixed government had been idealized b y equation less with Polybius’s Book vi than with Plato’s Law s .119 The “ artificial angel” was miraculously, because rationally, stable, perfect, and timeless, relatively free from the shadows of ambiguity and ulti­ mate doom that overhung Polybius’s Rome or Machiavelli’s Florence. W here Giannotti, knowing that his own city ’s history was one of insta­ bility, had first asked questions about Venetian history which he left unanswered,120 and had later felt obliged to devise means of analyzing instability and providing for stability that carried him aw ay from all three of his masters— Aristotle, Polybius, and Machiavelli— Contarini needed to take neither of these steps. N or did he follow Savonarola in presenting his republic as playing a messianic role at an apocalyptic moment. Yet we must avoid dismissing Venetian republican thought as the mere projection into myth of a Platonic self-image. In a most magis­ terial treatment of the subject, W illiam J. Bouwsma has shown that Venetian thought did not stand still with Contarini but developed dur­ ing the next eighty years, first with Paruta and afterwards with Sarpi, a sense of the particularity and moral autonomy of history which was founded on a series of assertions of V enice’s unique individuality against the universalist claims of the Counter-Reformation papacy.121 And just as for Florence, the republican vision of history carried with 119 G ilbert, “ V en etian Constitution,” pp. 468-70. 120 Above, nn. 23, 24. 121 William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the A ge of the Counter Reformation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968).

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it shadows as well as lights; Sarpi’s H istory o f the Council o f Trent is as disenchanted a record of human failure and frailty as anything in Guicciardini.122 The timeless myth and the history that lacked finality were, we must recollect, two responses to the same problem: the republic’s struggle to attain self-sufficient virtue and stability in a con­ text of particularity, time, and change. It might escape from history by a self-constituent act of timeless rationality; it might seek to tame history by combining in a grand synthesis all the elements of instabil­ ity, identified and interwoven; or it might confess that the problem could not be solved and that the pitfalls of history remained forever open. Contarini is nearer to the first position than to the second; Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Sarpi nearer to the third than to the second. Giannotti’s significance lies in the originality of his contribu­ tions to the second, to the science that pursued stability. He has appeared in these pages, it is true, as a thinker who to some extent sought to draw Machiavelli’s fangs, reconciling Rome with Venice, transcending both models, and presenting the armed popular republic as devoted to its own virtue rather than to conquest and expansion— thus seeming to free it from the Ragnarok of the “ univer­ sal w o lf.” Partly because he was less interested in war than was Machia­ velli, and more interested in the theory of constitutional equilibrium, he was able to carry the science of mixed government to points not reached b y other Florentine analysts; but while on the one hand this means that fortune’s role in his thought is restricted b y the wealth of his explanatory devices, his failure to develop a theory of sovereignty resting on the legislative power meant that he had not escaped from the world in which Contarinian myth and Machiavellian or Guicciardinian realism were the confining alternatives, since a republic which could not legislate itself must be restricted to the struggle to maintain prima forma. It reverted to being the political form in which was attained the universal good, which meant that there was no political activity other than the maintenance of form. If Machiavelli and G u ic­ ciardini did not, with all their brilliance, succeed in seeing political activity as creative, but only in showing just how difficult, or impos­ sible, the maintenance of republican order really was, we are obliged to think of cinquecento civic realism, even at its height, as a kind of negative capability of the Aristotelian mind. Its awareness of the quali­ tative character and even the irreversibility of historical change was arrived at b y recombining the categories of Aristotelian thought, and its concern with fortuna varied inversely as these categories could sug­ gest new conceptual means of controlling her. It can be suggested also 122 Bouwsma, ch. x. 328

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that these limitations were in part imposed upon Machiavellian thought by its obstinately durable moralism. Aristotelian republicanism was exclusively concerned with the citi­ zen, and there was no need for Florentine and Venetian theorists to abandon it so long as they too were concerned only with him and his chances of escaping corruption; indeed, within its traditions they found it possible greatly to enlarge their vocabulary for discussing his problems. But for all the tough-mindedness of Machiavelli and G u ic­ ciardini, the fact remains that the weakness of the Aristotelian and humanist tradition was the insufficiency of its means for discussing the positive, as opposed to the preservative, exercise of power. W e earlier considered the possibility that some political agency might acquire so developed a capacity for dealing with particular and changing prob­ lems as they arose that society’s institutional means of dealing with such problems were in constant change and capable of changing themselves. It is evident that such an agency would be government in the modern sense, that it would be legislating in the modern sense, and that such a political society would be a modern administrative state possessed of a dimension of historical change and adaptation. But a body of political theory exclusively concerned with how the citizen is to develop his human capacities b y participating in decisions aimed at the subjection of private to public goods is unlikely to develop a concern for, or a vocabulary for dealing with, government as a positive or creative activ­ ity. Under sixteenth-century conditions, it tended to reduce politics to the structure within which the individual asserted his moral autonomy, and legislation to the purely formal activity of establishing and restor­ ing such a structure, so that any but a destructive innovation in time became virtually impossible. W e have also seen that a view of politics which confined it to the assertion of values, or virtues, b y individuals in public acts discouraged, every time that it encouraged, any attempt to treat it as the concurrent exercise of different kinds of power. Gian­ notti took a first step in that direction, but was unable to take a sec­ ond; and the Polybian concept of a balance between different agencies exercising power seems so far to have been acutely self-limiting. W e m ay say that all this reveals the deficiencies of Aristotelian theory, but it is possible also— though debatable— that power in a face-to-face polis must be so far dispersed and personal as to render difficult the growth of theory about the several specialized w ays of exercising it. The next step will be to study the development of humanist and Machiavellian thought in a society made up of several institutionalized agencies exercising different kinds of power: post-Tudor England, with its king, its law, its parliament, and its church. But we shall find 329

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that each of these agencies secreted and disseminated its own ideology, its own modes of defining political society and the political individual; with the consequence that it was only with difficulty, and in a variety of very special senses, that the English realm could be defined as a civic community or republic, in which politicized individuals pursued a vivere civile. W e shall have to study how it happened that Englishmen could begin to project an image of themselves and their society in Machiavellian terms; but we shall find that this process involved a restatement of civil history in terms both positive and negative, which defined government as modern in the act of rebelling against its mod­ ernity. Exported to the Atlantic’s western shores, this contributed pow erfully to the complexity of American values.

33 °

PART THREE

V A L U E A N D H IS T O R Y IN T H E P R E R E V O L U T IO N A R Y A T L A N T IC

CH APTER X

T H E PROBLEM OF E N G LISH M ACH IAVELLISM Modes of Civic Consciousness before the Civil War

[i] i n t h e p r e c e d i n g c h a p t e r s we have been engaged upon an explora­ tion of a mode of thought which may be termed “ Machiavellism,” and consisted in the articulation of civic humanist concepts and values under the stresses of the Florentine predicament in the years 1494 to 1530. A conceptual world dominated b y the paradigms of use, faith, and fortune was subjected to strain b y the republican decision to pursue universal values in a transitory form, and this strain was intensified b y happenings in the world of experience after 1494, when the Florentine republic failed to maintain itself against Medicean reac­ tion and the Italian republics failed to maintain their system of rela­ tionships against French and Spanish intruders. From these complex tensions we have noted two major outputs: Machiavelli’s revision of the concept of virtu, finding its most controversial expression in the advice given to the principe nuovo and its most durable lessons in the theory of arms as essential to liberty; and a renewed and intensified study of the Aristotelian-Polybian theory of mixed government, in which Venice figured as both paradigm and myth and, in her capacity as antithesis to Rome, helped deflect attention from M achiavelli’s mili­ tary populism. T h e concepts of custom, apocalypse, and anakuklosis, based on the triad of use, faith, and fortune, have remained operable throughout, and w e have noted only an observable tendency— of great importance to republican theory— to replace the concept of fortune with that of corruption: a means, it may be suggested, of introducing secondary causes into what was otherwise an image of pure random­ ness. In this respect there has been an intensification of historical selfunderstanding; but the medieval triad remains intact. W e have next to embark upon a study of how patterns of “ Machia­ vellian” thought became operative in England, and at a later period in colonial and revolutionary Am erica; and, as regards England at least, the greatest single difficulty we face is that there occurred in that cul­ ture nothing like the relatively simple options for vita activa, vivere

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civile and the republican remodeling of the historical self-image, which were all we found necessary to posit in order to account for the highly complex conceptual rearrangements which ensued. Republican and Machiavellian ideas had to become domiciled in an environment domi­ nated b y monarchical, legal, and theological concepts apparently in no w ay disposed to require the definition of England as a polis or the Englishman as a citizen. Our first problem will be to ascertain how it was that they became domiciled at all, and we cannot do this without initially reviewing the modes of consciousness with which they had to compete; we shall have to see whether these earlier political languages encountered problems which made a partial recourse to the republican vocabulary convenient or necessary. There is a prima facie case for holding that an ideology of civic activism was incompatible with either the institutions or the beliefs of territorial monarchy. T o use the terminology of W alter Ullmann,1 the “ descending thesis” of authority left the individual under a king with little function but to obey those above him in a hierarchical order and to pass on the duty of obedience to those below him; while the “ ascending thesis” o f corporate rationality served mainly as a theo­ retical means of constituting a people as a body intelligent enough to recognize that it had a head, a stalagmite of intelligence capable of ris­ ing toward the descending stalactite of authority. T he corpus misticum which Fortescue recognized as needing to be governed politice 2 was far from being an Aristotelian polis, it was a fellowship of reason, capable of cognizing rational laws, a fellowship of experience, capable of generating a body of remembered customs which became its second nature, but not a fellowship of action or a partnership of directing virtues in which men were intelligently participant according to the diversity of their individualities. Fortescue could never have recog­ nized predicaments like those diagnosed b y Machiavelli and G uicciar­ dini as part of the very stuff of political life, or devised machinery like that of Guicciardini and Giannotti as the means b y which such predica­ ments could be resolved; Venice to him was a legal entity distinguished b y the antiquity and rationality of its municipal laws,3 just as England was. T h e corpus misticum was, indeed, exposed to the solvents of methodological individualism: a body whose head was the prince, it was 1 Principles of Government and Politics in the M iddle Ages (above, ch. i, n. 32); History of Political Thought in the M iddle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965); The Individual and Society in the M iddle Ages (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966). For a vigorous critique, see Francis Oak­ ley, “ Celestial Hierarchies Revisited: Walter Ullmann’s Vision of Medieval Poli­ tics,” Past and Present 60 (1973), 3-48. 2 De Laudibus Legum A nglie, ch. xm. 3 Above, pp. 14-16.

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nevertheless made up of individuals who had heads of their own— as in the frontispiece to Leviathan— and the problem of relating the intelli­ gence of the subject to the intelligence of the prince could be produc­ tive of tensions. But reason and experience alone could never provide grounds for characterizing the individual as a citizen; that could only happen if there were revival of the ancient notions of political virtus, of the zdon politikon whose nature was to rule, to act, to make decisions; and so far, only the ideology of the vita activa, operating in a communal climate where men were indeed called to assemble and make decisions, has emerged as showing how such a revival could take place. In the territorial and jurisdictional monarchy, the individual took on positive being primarily as the possessor of rights— rights to land, and to justice affecting his tenure of land— and a structure of “ ascend­ ing authority” existed mainly as a structure of customs, jurisdictions, and liberties, in which such rights were embodied and preserved and which rose to meet the descending structure of authority that existed to command its continuance and enforcement. In the world of jurisdictio and gubernaculum the individual possessed rights and property— proprietas, that which rightfully pertained to him— and was subject to authority which, since it descended from God, was never the mere reflection of his rights; and the central debate was, and has remained, how far the two conceptual schemes— ascending and descending pow ­ ers, jurisdictio and gubernaculum, rights and duties— were integrated with one another. It can be strongly affirmed, however, that to define the individual in terms of his rights and his duties, his property and his obligations, is still not enough to make him an active citizen or a political animal. It is not surprising, then, that for some time scholars have sought to raise not only the question of how the values and concepts of civic humanism could become established in a territorial-jurisdictional mon­ archy such as England,4 but the larger question of how and when, in what terms and under what conditions, the Englishman could develop a civic consciousness, an awareness of himself as a political actor in a public realm. One of these books, Donald Hanson’s From Kingdom to Com m onwealth , 5 is noteworthy for the stringency of its assertion that jurisdictio and gubernaculum were never integrated and hardly related; that medieval and T udor Englishmen lived under a conceptual scheme of intractable duality which the author terms “ double majesty” ; and that the collapse of this duality, which Hanson considers did not take place until the Civil W ar of 1642-1646, was the necessary and (it 4 E.g., Denys H ay in A . Molho and J. Tedeschi (eds.), Renaissance: Studies in Ho?iour of Hans Baron (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971). 5 For full title see above, ch. 1, n. 30.

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would almost seem) the sufficient condition of “ the growth of civic consciousness.” If this is a correct summary, the argument would appear somewhat too drastic, but it has the merit of posing a challenge which historians have been tardy in recognizing. The growth in E ng­ land of civic consciousness as he defines it does indeed present a prob­ lem; it is a difficult subject of which less than enough has been w rit­ ten; but there is evidence to suggest that it grew along a number of lines, and that we should proceed cautiously as we approach the fur­ ther problem of how the Englishman acquired the means of seeing him­ self, in Aristotelian, Machiavellian, or Venetian terms, as a classical citi­ zen acting in a republic. One powerful and persuasive argument presents the saint as preced­ ing the citizen. W alzer’s The Revolution of the Saints6 presents the Calvinist or classical Puritan individual as the type of the first revolu­ tionary, the first radically alienated man in modern Europe, filled with a sense of his loneliness— a loneliness before God— associating with others on the basis of their common responsibility to values which are not those of society, and possessing a program of action w hereby these values are to become the foundation of a reformation of the world. W alzer salutes— though he does not share— the older Marxism of Christopher H ill,7 in which the alienation and activism of the Puritan creed appear as the ideology of middling and industrious persons emerging from the broken forms of feudal society. W alzer’s saints are clerics, gentlemen, and lesser nobility, and the social origins of their alienation are not located in a feudal-to-bourgeois transition. But if the abortive revolutions of seventeenth-century England were not made by middling and industrious persons, they were not made b y the classical Puritan ministers depicted by W alzer— indeed, his analysis specifically stops short of the sectarians who made them.8 The abortive revolutions were the w ork of an arm y— a unique phenomenon in itself— inspired b y millennial hopes which were only half accepted, and led b y legally educated lesser gentry profoundly split in their ideologies, almost to the point where this amounted to a split in personalities. W ith half their minds they were radical saints; with the other half they were conservative reformers, deeply committed to a traditional order in which they saw the source of all secular values, even those which should reform it. T heir revolution failed less because there were not enough of them— revolutions are the w ork of minorities— than because they constantly 6 Walzer, Revolution of the Saints (see above, ch. n, n. 22). 7 Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1958); Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: Schocken Books, 1964). 8 Walzer, pp. viii, 115, n. 3.

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and fatally insisted that their radical and chiliastic reformation must be endorsed and legitimized by the ancient liberties of England. It can even be argued that their chiliasm was part of their failure to detach themselves w holly from the secular world. The pure Calvinism iso­ lated b y W alzer was too austere, too rigid in its alienation, to need the visionary hopes of apocalyptic promise; but chiliasm was a more prom­ inent feature of the Puritan mind than he has recognized. There are dimensions which need to be added to W alzer’s portrait, and it will appear that these are dimensions of time. In the first place, there is need to study the eschatological dimension of the saint’s activism— the sacred present in which he acted, the sacred future which he expected to determine it— and this would take us all the w ay from Calvin’s rigorous (and perhaps Augustinian) refusal of all speculation upon this question, through the steadily increasing chiliasm of the sects and the steadily increasing antinomianism which accompanied it. But it would not be sufficient to study this dimension in isolation, since we shall find that in England— apparently to a greater degree than in any other Protestant society— apocalyptic was national, a mode of envisag­ ing the nation as existing and acting in sacred time, with the conse­ quence that the English saint might see his election and his nationality as co-inherent: he was a saint as he was one of “ G o d ’s Englishmen.” But “ England” remained an obstinately national and secular concept— there was no Puritan Logres, the mystical and esoteric Britain of the Arthurian romantics— and the English apocalypse, the doctrine of the Elect Nation, has therefore to be considered as, in part, a means of conceptualizing, in a complex and particular time-frame, a public realm, at once secular and godly, in which the individual, at once saint and Englishman, is to act. In these terms it becomes a mode of civic consciousness, one of those modes for whose emergence in English his­ tory we have begun to seek; and since there could be tensions— the whole history of the Cromwellian years is testimony to them— between the individual’s veneration for the institutions of his Elect Nation and the radical acts which his election might call him to perform upon them, chiliasm’s evident concessions to the saeculum become impor­ tant. Since it was in part a mode of national consciousness, it could take a conservative or a radical form ; and since it might pose the dilemma between conservative and radical action, it might raise the problem of innovation in a form greatly but not overwhelm ingly remote from that in which Machiavelli had considered it under the heading of virtu. The apocalyptic mode can therefore be studied as one of those modes of secular consciousness which blurred the purity of the “ revolution of the saints,” and as one of those modes of civic consciousness which antedated the arrival of the classical concept of citizenship. 337

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The problem now becomes that of exploring what further modes there were, available to Englishmen of the post-Reformation era, of conceptualizing a public realm in which they might act and modes of action appropriate to the realm thus defined. Since there is already rea­ son to suspect that the dilemma of Cromwellian Puritanism was a dilemma between several modes of action, one of which was that of the radical saint, we may further suspect that the alternative modes, whatever they may have been, had grown up together with the lastnamed and were in some measure co-inherent with it. If w e can trace such a growth, it will deliver us from the oversimplification apparently to be found in Hanson— in which there is nevertheless some truth— that Englishmen, denied civic consciousness b y the prevalence of “ dou­ ble m ajesty,” were pitchforked into it b y the trauma of “ double m ajesty’s” collapse; as from the oversimplification, possessing a long and more or less Marxist pedigree, that an intensely religious conscious­ ness of individuality was secularized into bourgeois rationalism over­ night, since it had never been more than the ideology of an emergent class— though there is much evidence to suggest that rapid seculariza­ tion of consciousness did occur and requires explanation. There is an interesting passage in The Revolution of the Saints in which W alzer, follow ing H. G . Koenigsberger, presents revolutionary consciousness as developing in response to the “ modern state’s” impact upon con­ sciousness in general;9 but he appears to visualize this “ state,” very much in the romantic tradition, as a leveling, centralizing and rational­ izing force, to which an appropriate response is the hardness of indi­ vidual alienation. Both W alzer and Hanson, in their very different w ays, seem much under the influence of the concept of “ traditional society” as the inert and prepolitical antithesis of “ modernization” ;10 and this concept, however carefully refined, is liable to dichotomize our thinking. W e have seen at considerable length that Old Western men had access to more modes of consciousness and articulation than the m erely traditional; and the paradigm of “ humanism,” within which this book so largely operates, should suggest a similar diversity of modes of intensifying the individual’s consciousness of himself in rela­ tion to the saeculum and the secular culture. A n impressive literature of recent historiography indicates that English humanism developed its civic awareness b y projecting the image of the humanist as counselor to his prince. T o the extent to which the humanist thus envisaged possessed, like Fortescue’s law yer, 9 Walzer, pp. 1-2, 16. He lutionary Parties in France Journal of Modern History 10 Walzer, pp. 1-4, 13-16,

refers to Koenigsberger, “The Organisation of Revo­ and the Netherlands during the Sixteenth Century,” 27 (19 5 5 ), 3 3 5 -5 1. 19; Hanson, pp. viii-ix, 2, 7, 9, n , 18, 336-44, 349-54.

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awareness and skills which the prince did not, he was contributing to an association a virtue of his own, an individual capacity for participa­ tion in rule, and had thus taken a step in the direction of the Aris­ totelian image of the citizen. In Th e Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance 11 Arthur B. Ferguson has traced through Thomas More, Thomas Starkey, and Thomas Smith the growth of the self-image of the counselor: of his understanding of the role he played, the intel­ lectual and political capacities he must possess in order to play it, and the public realm in which he played it, seen as an association of ruler and subjects whose relationships might be defined in terms of their reciprocal obligations to seek counsel and to give it. As Ferguson’s nar­ rative develops, there is in some respects a grow ing stress on associa­ tion at the expense of hierarchy; the counselor is increasingly known b y his capacities, on which the prince relies, and is becoming some­ thing more than a “ good” subject appealing to the conscience of a “ good” ruler; and words like “ civic” and “ citizen” become usable by Ferguson and b y some of his central figures. But the community of counsel does not become a republic in the acephalous sense; “ common weal” or res publica, it remains a corpus of which the prince is head, a hierarchy of degree in which counsel is given b y every man sitting in his place. (W alzer points out that the image of a diversity of particular virtues was actually better preserved in the medieval hierarchy of degree than in the inscrutable individualism of the predestinarian Calvinists.)12 In the same w ay, Ferguson traces how the increasing humanist ability to control secular concepts gave rise in England, as it so often did elsewhere, to an enhanced capacity to see the realm as an entity undergoing change over time;13 but it is highly significant to note what forces he sees as setting limits to this increase. The social idealists of the mid-sixteenth century saw government— the wisdom of the prince counseled by the wisdom of the realm in parliament— as capable of legislation, and legislation as capable of bringing about a more just and a more prosperous distribution of the common weal than actually existed; the humanists who “ discoursed of the common weal” dedicated themselves to an understanding of the economic forces at w ork in society. This thrust, however, together with what ideologies of dynamism it carried with it, was turned back in favor of the static and medieval ideal of maintaining the realm as a hierarchy of degree, a 11 Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1965). 12 Walzer, ch. v, “The Attack upon the Traditional Political W orld,” pp. 14898. 13 Ferguson, ch. x i i i , “The Commonweal and the Sense of Change: Some Impli­ cations,” pp. 363-400.

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frame of order which must not be shaken; there was only one order and chaos lay outside it. W hat is significant here is that Ferguson’s exploration of “ civic” aspects of English humanism has led us to the concepts of parliament and legislation. As we broaden our view of the different versions of civic humanism, we look for local variants of the figure of the “ citizen,” the zoon politikon who rules and is ruled. In French legal humanism and the political thought of the W ars of Religion, he seems to appear chiefly in the guise of the subordinate magistrate (whether seigneur or officier) who rules and is ruled; and we ask the question, to which Bodin returned on the whole a negative answer, whether a society of such magistrates could constitute a polis or community o f participa­ tion. But England possessed, in court, common law and parliament, a more intensive organization of national consultation, and instead of the magistrate exercising his subordinate or derived imperium we meet with the more many-sided, and in that respect more civic, figure of the counselor, who m ay appear as the country gentleman, representing a shire or borough to counsel his prince in parliament, under a writ which enjoins him to treat of all matters affecting the realm and to serve as representative of the whole body politic, in a commune con­ silium regni. As the sixteenth-century gentry moved massively into the representation of boroughs, they moved massively into the schools, uni­ versities, and inns of court, seeking in all these an education which equipped them to serve the prince, to counsel the prince, and to com­ pete for local office and influence in a structure of government and jurisdiction which was at once the prince’s and theirs. The education they received m ay in a highly general sense be termed humanist, and in search for an English variant of politically active humanism, and for a humanist-derived mode of civic consciousness available to English­ men, we may turn from the idealists of the mid-century toward the emergent ideologies of the parliamentary gentry. M id-century humanism had, perhaps, entertained the vision of par­ liament legislating for the commonweal; but by the end of the century, the gentlemen of the House of Commons more and more saw parlia­ ment’s function as the preservation of liberty, and liberty as rooted in a fabric of immemorial custom with which it was possible to identify every major juridical and governmental institution, up to and includ­ ing parliament itself. The ideology of the Ancient Constitution can be accounted for b y means of a purely structural explanation: all English law was common law, common law was custom, custom rested on the presumption of immemoriality; property, social structure, and gov­ ernment existed as defined by the law and were therefore presumed to 34 °

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be immemorial.14 But if we think of it as ideology, as coming into being as social creatures sought new ways of conceptualizing themselves, we can characterize it as a mode of civic consciousness particularly appro­ priate to a gentry asserting itself in parliament, in litigation, and in the local administration of the common law. And the word “ civic” is not used inadvertently. Nothing could be more misleading than to picture the vehement assertion of the antiquity of English laws and liberties as an inert acceptance of “ traditional society.” It was rather traditionalist than traditional— to adopt a distinction of Levenson’s15— an assertion of conservatism; and conservation is a mode of action. The English­ man who saw his realm as a fabric of custom, and himself as a customgenerating animal, saw proprietor, litigant, judge, counselor, and prince as engaged in a constant activity, one of preserving, refining and trans­ mitting the usages and customs that made him and England what they were. The cult of customary antiquity was a peculiarly English brand of legal humanism, and the great Jacobean antiquaries, who asserted it as they began undermining it, were humanists of a very special sort; and, however remote from civic humanism in the republican and Flor­ entine sense, it was, unmistakably and post-medievally, a species of civic consciousness. It defined, in traditionalist terms, a public realm and a mode of action therein. W e have seen that custom, as the origin of second nature, served as the best means of explaining what made a people and its laws uniquely and autonomously themselves; and wherever we read that a people must be governed by laws suited to its nature, it is second nature and customary law that are primarily intended. A claim to uniqueness was a claim to autonomy, and when it was asserted that there was nothing in English law and government that was not customary and autochtho­ nous, the claim was being made that the English possessed a historical and immemorial sovereignty over themselves; they were not, and they had never been, anything which was not of their own making. More ef­ fectively even than the Henrician assertion that England was “ an empire 14 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law , chs. n and h i . 15 This antithesis recurs throughout Levenson’s writings (above, ch. vm, n. 54), denoting a difference to be drawn between the mere transmission of a tradition and the defensive conceptualization of either tradition or transmission. (For another elaboration of this theme, cf. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, pp. 233-72.) The theme of Confucian China a?id its Modern Fate led Levenson to stress how a tradition might die when it needed to be conceptualized in traditionalistic terms; but for his comparison between China and late 18th-century Eng­ land—where this did not follow—see his Liang ChH-ch'ao and the M ind of M od­ ern China (2d ed., 1967), pp. 151-52. 341

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and hath so been acknowledged in the w orld,” 16 this articulated a claim to national secular independence of the universal church. In French thought of the later sixteenth century, an affinity has been traced between Gallicanism, which asserted the jurisdictional autonomy of the church in France, and the labors of great scholars and antiquaries who used the sheer complexity of French legal and institutional history to argue that it was sui generis and of its own making.17 Conceptually of less sophistication, the cult of the Ancient Constitution did the same service for the Church of England as by law established. But the historical autonomy of England in religious affairs was asserted— as that of France was not, and as does not seem to have been the case on a comparable scale in any other Protestant nation— by means of the construction of a national apocalyptic, primarily a prod­ uct of the Marian exile and classically expressed in John Foxe’s Acts and M onuments. It seems not impossible that the conceptual origin of this English restatement of sacred history lay in the Henrician claim that England was an “ empire.” If H enry V III’s servants intended no more than an assertion of juridical status, nevertheless an empire must have a historical affiliation with Rom e; and the figure of Constantine, born at Y ork and playing a role in the Trojan and Arthurian legends of “ Britain,” was ready to hand.18 But Constantine in his role as first Christian emperor, maker and unmaker of popes and councils, author or non-author of the supposed Donation, could also figure at the high­ est level of argument concerning the derivations of church and empire. He might appear as the “ equal of the apostles” who had established the church as an extension of imperial authority, or he might appear as the grand apostate who had established a false church by an unwarranted abdication of that authority; and variations on both these themes were numerous and bewildering. A n y or all of them, however— and sooner or later the same must be true of any interpretation of the church in terms of rival legal systems— must present the Body of Christ, or church militant, as appearing in history, and consequently must pre­ sent a scheme of sacralized history for it to appear in. W e are back at the point where the secular prince and the anti-Augustinian heretic might join hands; both desired to deny that the church on earth pos1 6 Pream ble to the A ct in Restraint of Appeals ( 1 5 3 3 ) . R . Koebner, Empire (Cam bridge U n iversity Press, 19 6 1), pp. 53-5 5 , and below , n. 18. 17 D onald R . K elley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship , especially chs. vi, ix, and x. 18 F . J. L e v y , Tudor Historical Thought (San M arino: T h e H un tin gton L ib ra ry , 1967), p. 83; he cites R . Koebner, ‘“ T h e Im perial C ro w n o f this R ealm ’: H e n ry V III, Constantine the G rea t and P olyd o re V e rg il,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 26 (1953), 29-52. 342

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sessed an authority derived from the unmoving celestial hierarchies and willed b y God from the extra-temporal perspective of the nunc-stans, and both had an interest in reidentifying human salvation with human history, in order to deny that the pope possessed such an authority and to explain how he had asserted a false claim to it. But if human history and human salvation were coterminous processes, a sustained historical injustice— such as one which denied this identification— must be the w ork of forces hostile to salvation; and it was to become near-dogma that the pope wras identical with Antichrist, the false image of Christ’s return who figured in so many versions of the eschatological drama.19 T h e pope’s falsehood consisted not in any claim to be the returning Messiah, but in his assertion that Christ was present throughout time, in the substances of the sacrament and in the institutions of the church. Against him godly princes, upholding their purely secular authority, upheld the purity of that time in which Christ had not yet returned and it was known that he had not but would. T h e saeculum was more truly Christian than the false pretense of eternity maintained by Rome. If the new radical saints, each conscious of his own utter isolation before God and the utter uniqueness of each believer’s relation with God, did not see the secular prince as exercising a Christ-like author­ ity— some probably did— they nevertheless saw him as a witness and protector of witnesses to the truth concerning Christ’s return: a judge, and at least a protector of prophets, in the new Israel. But the grow th of an English apocalyptic also stems from the cir­ cumstance that it was England which now claimed to stand responsible for its own acts in the drama of sacred history. In a sense, the imperial and apocalyptic mythologies were only means of projecting this new mode of consciousness. In the seminal modern study of Foxe, Haller points out— from a standpoint far removed from W alzer’s— that the leaders of the Marian exiles were not alienated rebels, “ but high-rank­ ing members of a displaced hierarchy and intellectual class cherishing a real prospect of returning b y legitimate means to legitimate pow er.” 20 The sign from heaven which convinced them that their nation was elect— the death of M ary and the advent of Elizabeth— ensured their legitimate return and delivered them from resort to tyrannicide and rebellion; how far they could have been pushed toward truly revolu­ tionary alienation, had this event been long delayed, we cannot know. T h e point is that it was not delayed, and that the “ empire” which they saw as adversary o f Antichrist and witness to the truth remained “ Eng­ 19 William M. Lamont, G odly R u le; Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seven­ teenth-Century England (London: Oxford University Press, 1971). 20 Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (above, ch. 11, n. 22), p. 85. 343

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land” — a complex of secular laws, secular legitimacy, and secular his­ tory. This complex occupied an apocalyptic moment and discharged an apocalyptic role; we have another illustration of the thesis that it was the secular which necessitated the apocalyptic; but there is an important difference between this and the last time we saw such a thing happen. T o Savonarola the affirmation of Florence’s apocalyptic role involved both an affirmation and a repudiation of the city’s secular past; it was the “ second nature” of the Florentines which fitted them to inaugurate the renovation of the church, but in that renovation “ sec­ ond nature” was to be burned away. T o the legal and legitimist minds of T udor Englishmen, renovation— if they thought of the w ord— was primarily a matter of recovering a rightful jurisdiction over themselves (even the saint was radically legal-minded). But a jurisdiction— espe­ cially to men disposed to think of law in terms of precedent and cus­ tom— must be rooted in a past, and that past must constantly be affirmed. Consequently, the vision of England as occupying a moment of apocalyptic election entailed the vision of England discharging a special role—largely identical with the maintenance of an autonomous jurisdiction— throughout church history. Archbishop Parker, as well as John Foxe, labored to recover the details of this history, in which Joseph of Arimathea, Constantine, K in g John, W yclif, and Elizabeth all played important parts;21 and the idea of England’s uniqueness in sacred history culminates in Milton’s much-quoted but quite un-JohnBullish remark that God revealed himself “ as his manner is, first to his Englishmen.” 22 The English apocalyptic was therefore past-facing and, initially at least, tended toward the postmillennialist assertion that the thousand years of the devil’s binding are over and the climactic struggle with Antichrist at hand, rather than to the premillennialist proclamation of a thousand-year reign of Christ and the saints, in which the renovation of all things is imminent. The former is more likely to affirm the valid­ ity of existing institutions, the latter to proclaim their imminent tran­ scendence; two attitudes which Savonarola had brought very close together, but which here appear w idely separated. The difference between them is one of choice and emphasis; the postmillennialist may still look to a reign of Christ on earth yet to come, but is frequently dramatizing his decision not to do so; but we have now returned to the point of studying apocalyptic as a mode of civic consciousness. The Elect Nation— England seen as occupying a moment and possessing a dimension in sacred history— was a theater of action, and the individual 21 Haller, pp. 63-70, 108-109, 137-38, 149-72; Levy, pp. 87-97, 101-105, 114-23. 22 Milton, Areopagitica; W orks, iv (New York: Columbia University Press, •93i), p. 34°-

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was b y its structure defined— as “ G o d ’s Englishman” rather than simple “ saint” — as acting a role therein. The modes of his action, however, could be and were defined in more than one w ay. As a subject of the “ godly prince,” successor perhaps of Constantine, who ruled the Elect Nation and preserved it against encroaching Antichrist, his action was defined as his obedience; it has been convincingly shown how, to Foxean Puritans, the sin of the Laudian episcopate was that they derogated from the prince’s authority, not that they made it absolute.23 But the uniqueness of England, and so the purity of its immunity from Antichrist, could also be defined in terms of its antiquity as a commu­ nity of custom; and here the activity of G o d ’s Englishman was that of an inheritor at common law, receiving property, liberties, and customs from his ancestors and passing them on in a perpetual condition of refinement. T o the men of 1628 the reaffirmation of Magna Carta and the struggle against Antichrist at home and abroad were to be much the same.24 But finally, the activity of G o d ’s Englishman must sooner or later be defined as that of the Puritan saint; and here, a disjunction could become visible between the Elect Nation and the community of the elect. If the emphasis fell on the former, the individual’s business was to obey the prince, to continue the customs, to maintain the realm; if it fell on the latter, then the elect might do what they were called to do, and the theater of political action might consist exclusively of their relations, with God and with each other, as they did it. W e can easily see that G o d ’s Englishman might have to choose between acting as Englishman, as traditional political being, and as saint; but it is not certain that to see this is to see to the bottom of the problem. It is suggested that the English apocalyptic— to which no close paral­ lel seems to exist among the phenomena of Protestantism— developed because of the intensity of the English Protestant’s involvement with the secular institutions of his realm; simultaneously Erastian and chiliastic, he saw his election as identical with his membership in a historic nation, and rewrote sacred history to accommodate his election on the only terms possible. Recent w ork on the fairly close connection between John Foxe and John K nox suggests that the latter had rela­ tively little sense of historic Scottish nationality, and the apocalyptic thinking of Scots Calvinism before 1637 contains no coherent account of Scottish history as that of an Elect Nation.25 If then it was a secular 23 William M. Lamont, Marginal Prynne, 1600-1669 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 15-21. 24 See the speech of Rouse against Manwaring in Cobbett, Parliamentary His­ tory of England, 11 (18 0 7 ), 377-79. 25 Arthur H. Williamson, “ Antichrist’s Career in Scotland: The Imagery of Evil and the Search for a National Past,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, Wash­ ington University, 1973. 345

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commitment which impelled the Puritan saint in the direction of apoca­ lyptic, we must see him as markedly less alienated from the social order and its governance than W alzer at times suggests; and we must reexamine the role in Puritan thinking of that antinomianism which W alzer abstained from studying. Antinomianism classically arises when the believer comes to feel that the authority of God or Spirit, exercised directly over and within him, takes precedence over, and annuls, the authority of some law which he form erly acknowledged as uttering commands necessary to his salvation; in extreme cases he may symboli­ cally break the old law to signify that he has passed beyond or above it. Christians were antinomian in respect of the Mosaic law; Joachite Spirituals in respect of the Age of the Son and the authority of the successors of St. Peter; and a premillennial chiliasm is almost invariably antinomian in respect of existing forms of authority. But we think of antinomianism, considered as a phenomenon in the sociology of reli­ gion, as a characteristic of independent sects radically alienated from both ecclesiastical and magistratical authority; and in Anabaptists, Mennonites, and other sects of the Radical Reformation, there is plenty of evidence for this phenomenon. Radical and antinomian sects of many kinds wrere of course abundant in the Cromwellian phase of Puritanism, but in general they were characterized by a greater degree of politiciza­ tion, a greater willingness to advance programs o f drastic secular reform in fields such as government, law, and the distribution of prop­ erty, than characterized their Swiss, German, and Dutch equivalents; and the problem for historians has been to determine whether this simply indicates the impact, on the relatively self-conscious and highly governed society of England, of the difference between Calvinism and chiliasm, between the magisterial and radical Reformations. It has seemed possible that this was simply a difference of degree; that the same alienation, conviction of depravity, and experience of conversion, that led to the triumph of discipline in personalities of the Calvinist kind, produced the triumph of the antinomian Spirit in per­ sonalities of the sectarian kind; but W alzer, in deliberately cutting off his analysis short of the sectarians, may be hinting that a simple further stage of extrapolation is not enough to explain the phenomena of antinomianism. If it can be accepted, as we have been suggesting, that the English saint was not radically alienated from the secular order, but on the contrary radically involved in it, and that his apocalypticism was the measure and product of this involvement, the difference between Calvinism and chiliasm will cease to appear a simple matter of two stages in the same sequence of alienation. T he crucial moment will be that at which G od ’s Englishman, having initially believed that his nation was elect because of the intensity of his involvement in its

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institutions, comes to believe that some or all of these institutions are unw orthy of the w ork to which the nation is elect. This moment has been identified b y Lamont as one, frequently to be found about 1641 or 1643, at which the believer abandons the apocalyptic of Foxe in favor of that of Thomas Brightman, who declared that the Church o f England was no more than the Laodicea of the third chapter of Revela­ tions, and that the Philadelphia lay elsewhere or was yet to come.26 This is plainly a moment of antinomianism; but the laws which the elect are now rejecting are— since the church rejected is one “ b y law established” — of a secular character and possess a well-known secular history which must now be reevaluated and condemned. One by one, church, m onarchy, and parliament itself passed into this highly spe­ cialized limbo, and each time a new sector of English history was denied and rewritten; and while the political capacities of G o d ’s more antinomian Englishmen were bent upon the devising of new institu­ tions to replace them, those of Englishmen of an older stamp fell back on a sullen preference for what was ancient even if it was not elect. W illiam Prynne— again in Lamont’s analysis— emerges as one who opted for the Ancient Constitution at the end of a lifelong commitment to the Elect Nation; he closed his career heroically studying T ow er records in search o f the origins of Parliament, while rather pathetically comparing himself to Hilkiah the high priest who “ found the book of the law in the house of the Lord.” 27 There was no covenant to be found in the T o w er; only usage and precedent. Radical or conservative, G od ’s Englishmen might inadvertently sec­ ularize their thought either in asserting or in resisting a revolutionary impulse which we m ay now see as antinomian, the paradoxical out­ come of a commitment to English institutions so complete that chiliasts would feel called to transform them even if the process made rational utilitarians of its adepts; while conservatives would abandon, in order to defend them, the apocalyptic they had taken up in order to affirm their significance. The dialectic of Ancient Constitution and Elect Nation was complex and made up of many more than two theses. But— at the cost of looking far ahead into the Civil W ar and Cromwellian years— we have now constructed a survey of modes of civic conscious­ ness which we may hold in mind while exploring the origins of Machia­ vellian humanism in England. If there was ever a moment— some locate it under Protector Somerset m idway in the T udor century28— when 26 Lamont, Marginal Prynne, pp. 59-64; G odly R ule, pp. 49-52. 27 Pocock, Ancient Constitution, p. 159, and generally, pp. 155-62; Lamont, Marginal Prynne, pp. 175-92. 28 W . K. Jordan, Edw ard VI: the Young K ing (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1968), pp. 416-26, 432-38; Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen, pp. 271-73. 347

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“ commonwealth” humanists might hope to use the legislative power of parliament to bring about a regime of social justice, manv forces con­ spired to strangle it. Sheer fear of disorder compelled an obstinate adherence to the vision of England as a hierarchy of degree; the deter­ mination of the gentry to retain their established hold on land and local office ensured that, as thev flocked into parliament, schools and a new expansion of consciousness, their ideology would be one which pre­ sented parliament as a court and political activity as the maintenance of a heritage of customs. The hard core of Protestants returned from exile armed with an ideology intended as much for institutionally com­ mitted Englishmen as for radically alienated saints, and sought to imple­ ment their program of radical church reform through action in parlia­ ment, inaugurating its career of claiming a political initiative even against the crown. From the use of parliament to press Puritan demands it was never possible finally to drive them, and their efforts did much both to destroy the cohesion of crown and parliament and to institute that strange partnership of antiquity-upholding gentleman and law yer with activist and organizing saint, which was to split the Puritan mind and give it its dynamism, ensuring both revolution and the failure of revolution in the next century. G o d ’s Englishman was a complicated animal. If there was a revolu­ tion of the saints there was also a revolution of the counselors; but what the parliamentary gentry learned from classis, congregation and common law was a technique for organizing the House into commit­ tees which could d efy the Court while inventing new precedents and new claims to antiquity. This was a far cry from citizenship in the classical sense. N ew modes of civic consciousness and action there were in some profusion, but as yet there was no w ay of envisaging the politi­ cal community as the sum of these interacting modes, which we have seen to be the essence of the theory of the polis. In an important sense it is true after all that post-Elizabethan England lacked a fully devel­ oped civic consciousness, and was under the thralldom of a doctrine of double majesty. The literature of debate down to 16 14 and even 1649 shows that there was a highly wrought theory of kingship and author­ ity, a highly wrought theory of privilege and custom, a religious vener­ ation for both, and no known means of bringing them together. Yet to say that this reveals a lack of civic consciousness is less true than to say that there was an excess of it, more than the available institutional and conceptual schemes could contain. In the unheralded collapse of the forties and fifties, attempts both radical and conservative were made to restate the terms on which Englishmen as civic beings lived with one another; and in this endeavor theories of classical republicanism played their part. 348

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Custom and grace, then— two of the three components of the model on which this book is based— served as means of explaining a highly autonomous, late Tu d or England to itself and affording it images of its own particular yet continuous existence in time. W e are in search of the circumstances in which it became important to make use of the model’s third language of particularity: that based on the concepts of fortune and virtue, which in Florence appears to have become crucial only when republican consciousness reached a certain degree of inten­ sity. Elizabethan Englishmen were well acquainted with these concepts, and not a few of them were diligent students of humanist political theory in its republican form— Shakespeare’s Coriolanus could only have been played to an audience sensitive to the idea that a balanced republic was necessary to prevent the corruption of civic virtue29— but they were not in themselves republicans. Consequently, the enor­ mous literature of Fortune in their historical and dramatic writings is preponderantly subservient to the theme of order; the image of the W heel is used to warn the individual against vaulting ambition which may tempt him out of his degree.30 This is not w holly incompatible with a classical vision of citizenship; it is possible within limits to say that the Few and the M any are estates which must stay in their due places and practice their proper virtues, and to that extent the republic and the hierarchy are one. Yet there is a radical difference between elements ranked in a descending chain and elements balanced against one another. T he latter order is kinetic; the balance is maintained by the counterpressures, the countervailing activities, of the elements, and these must practice a relationship among themselves as well as each remaining fixed in its prescribed nature (or virtue). W e have seen Donato Giannotti pursuing the implications of a balance of activities to the point where contradictions began to emerge. In the final, Boethian, analysis, the price to be paid for a life of civic activity was vulnerability to fortune; and the republic, being that community in which each individual was defined b y his activity, was the community committed b y its political form to contend against that vulnerability. States and nations, like individuals, might rise and fall as ambition con­ demned them to mount upon the W heel, but only the republic obliged 29 See Huffman, cited above (ch. x, n. 2). 30 Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, pp. 212-25. F ° r a concept of fortuna preva­ lent among noble houses and their dependents, very far from the Court, but not basically different from the more traditional images there prevailing, see M. E. James, Past and Present 48 (1970), 71-78, and 60 (1973), 52. 349

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the individual to pit his virtue against fortune as a condition of his political being. Virtue was the principle of republics. A corollary is that, once a political society was envisaged as a com­ munity of active beings, we should expect to find signs of the virtuefortune polarity and— given the Europe-wide dissemination of Floren­ tine literature— of a true understanding and sharing of Machiavelli’s main concerns. But we have premised that in post-Reformation E ng­ land, such a consciousness would have to contend with others— the hierarchy of degree, the community of custom, the national structure of election— which defined the individual as public actor, while fixing his activity at levels lower than that which made Machiavellian man existentially dependent on his own virtue. As long as these modes of consciousness held, it would be difficult if not unnecessary to envisage the Englishman as Machiavellian citizen or England as a Machiavellian Rom e; and as long as it was presumed that the individual acted in a stable scheme of moral authority, consciousness of Machiavelli would be confined to— and would distort— the disturbing and morally sub­ versive aspects of his thought. The distortion may be further explained b y the hypothesis that his moral subversion can only be fully under­ stood when his republicanism has been fully understood and digested. T he subjects of Christian princes who raged against the wicked author of II Principe were unlikely to get things in the right perspective.31 If we premise that a true Machiavellism is to be looked for where a political society becomes highly conscious that its vita is activa to the point of creating its own morality, it is significant that the first English Machiavellians were courtiers. Post-Reformation England was still a princely society, and the social microcosm around the prince was the milieu in which men became most conscious of themselves as actively governing beings. Ideally, a court’s vision of itself was Platonic, a mat­ ter of degree and of planets revolving in their appointed orbits around a central sun; and even when it became evident that Greenw ich and W hitehall were not beautiful and harmless Urbinos but restless, ruth­ less, and sadomasochist vortices of power, the older perspective ensured that the W heel of Fortune remained the image of the courtier’s life in a sense enduringly medieval. He fell only because he had sought to rise. But the literature also betrays a perception— which Augustine and Boethius would have understood even while repudiating— that the courtier was what he could scarcely help being. He had his virtus, his ingenium, which impelled him to act, to seek both service and power, and which exposed him to fortuna. The more this was realized, the 31 The best account of English anti-Machiavellism is Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968). 35°

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more the court became a world with its own moral laws, and the courtier must b y his nature expose himself not only to the insecurities but to the moral dilemmas of life there. A late, Caroline, expression of this awareness is to be found in the great letter written b y Sir Edward Stanhope to W entw orth as the latter was resolving to take up the Lord Deputyship for Ireland.32 But though the Elizabethan and Jacobean Court produced much memorable language articulating the loathing and fascination felt toward it, no guide or manual to the courtier’s life attained to the level of political vision found in Machiavelli or Han Fei. As a political community, the court was not fully natural to man; it engaged too few aspects of too few personalities. O nly the republic posed the full moral challenge. It may be arguable that something of the politicized consciousness of the Court was transferred to the Country; that as discontented noblemen and gentlemen intensified their sense of community in parlia­ ment and the shires, England itself came to be envisaged as a common­ wealth in which the relationships between the estates and the sovereign were kinetic, liable to disturbance by fortune and capable of being described in terms bordering upon the Machiavellian. But our language here must still be tentative. Older modes of expression, centered upon the medieval image of authority descending from God and defining each degree in its place, were still so strong that elements of a republi­ can vision must be thought of as making head, slow ly and piecemeal, against a prevailing stream; and when we encounter— as we do— frag­ ments of thought which are recognizably Machiavellian, there is the further difficulty that these may have been filtered through an inter­ vening mode of expression known as Tacitism, whose relationship to Machiavellism is ambiguous.33 The Tacitean vision accepted the prince’s authority as natural, or at least established, rather than innova­ tive, and was thus enabled to share in the general denunciation of Machiavelli as skeptical toward authority to the point of atheism; but it focused upon the relations of courtiers, senators, and other aristo­ crats with a jealous and suspicious prince and was thus able to draw upon Machiavellian modes of depicting a restless and dangerous politi­ cal world which, however, was part of the universal structure of authority. The Tacitean prince did well to be suspicious, since he reigned naturally and legitimately over men who were no better than the real (or fallen) world allowed them to be; yet he might not be 32 Perez Zagorin, “Sir Edward Stanhope’s Advice to Thomas Wentworth . . . The Historical Journal 7, no. 2 (1964), 298-320. 33 Levy, pp. 237-51; Peter Burke, “Tacitism,” in T . A. Dorey (ed.), Tacitus (New York: Basic Books, 1969). 351

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able to resist the tendency of his suspicion to run to excess and distort the natural and legitimate functioning of his power— it was a trope that jealousy was a characteristic o f tyrants. Bacon’s H enry V II is a por­ trait of a prince who was, on the whole, successful in keeping his sus­ picion in check; but we are more than once told that though this king’s nobles were not in terror of him, yet they did not cooperate with him more than they must.34 T o the extent to which such language, Tacitean, Machiavellian, or other in its origins, came to be applied to the relation between the king and the estates or orders of his realm of England, the problem of sta­ bility within the realm would come to be described in terms other than those, predominantly medieval, which Tudor writers had used for deal­ ing with the wars of Lancaster and York. In the writings of some of the most pow erful— and unhappy— theoretical intellects among the post-Elizabethan courtiers, we can— subject to the above warnings— detect signs that such a thing was beginning to happen. Fulke G reville’s long versified Treatise o f M onarchy is, on the face of it, couched entirely in terms of a descending thesis of power: the king’s authority is absolute, not to be resisted b y men, and compared with aristocracy and dem ocracy only to the entire disadvantage of the latter as alterna­ tive modes of sovereignty. But it exists only in response to an imper­ fection in the world, and that imperfection is the result of a mutation, innovation, or fall. There was a golden age “ before the tymes of story,” in which order maintained itself without rule by sword or scepter, but some disproportioned tyde O f times self humours hath that commerce drow n’d T o which this image showes those tymes were bound.35 “ The tymes of story” began when men required to be ruled b y a sov­ ereign whose dread must keep them in order; and he is presented not simply as a judge, enforcing those eternal laws which men no longer obey of themselves, but a ruler practicing a manipulative statecraft, which works upon his subjects’ now perplexed, fearful, and powerseeking natures in w ays they do not fully understand. As an art it is arcane, because the beings on whom it is practiced are no longer w holly 34 Bacon, “History of the Reign of King Henry V II,” Works (eds. Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, London, 1890), vi, 242; “ O f Empire,” vi, 422. Levy, pp. 252-68, examines Tacitean historiography as exemplified in Bacon and Sir John Hayward. See also his introduction to his edition of The Reign of King H enry VII (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972). 35 G. A. Wilkes (ed.), Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke: The Re?nains, Being Poems of Monarchy and Religion (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 34 (stanza 1, line 1), 39 (stanza 18, lines 3-5). 352

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rational, and to the extent to which the king is a man, sharing in the general depravity, it may be arcane even to him. In a fallen world, even divinely commanded authority has the character of praxis rather than of pure norm. W hat makes the king’s power absolute is the fact of moral imperfection, and the conclusion seems inescapable that it may share in moral imperfection itself. Through the king, G od commands it so; but even the king may not know w hy. The distance between the king as G o d ’s deputy executing his judgments and the conqueror as G o d ’s scourge executing his punishments is great but not unbridge­ able; and in this context many writers and preachers were to rehearse the ambiguities of G o d ’s warnings to the Israelites when they would have a king. Greville, taking up a classical theme, explains how the “ strong tyrant” will, if he is wise, rule in a manner almost indistinguish­ able from that of a good king36— a subject treated by Aristotle and disturbingly exploited b y Machiavelli. But since what makes the tyrant rule virtuously is not moral wisdom and rationality, but mere w orldly prudence, he does not fully understand the reason for his own virtue. W e are back in the world of Machiavelli’s centaur, and there is a dis­ turbing suggestion that all kings were centaurs in the beginning— “ strong tyrants” in at least half of their natures. There is a disjunction between the king’s authority and his intellect: the form er is absolute because the latter is imperfect, and since the imperfection of intellect is shared b y the king with all men, the author­ ity which G od commands over all fallen men is located in the individ­ ual as king only providentially and must be exercised absolutely, but at the same time only prudentially and not rationally. The w ay is now open to say that because the king shares imperfection of intellect with his subjects, he should take counsel o f their laws and customs and of themselves in occasional and regular assemblies; but that because authority is, under God, his alone, he can never be obliged to take counsel of law or parliament and does so only because prudence enjoins it. But this is to say m erely that his descending authority meets, in imperfection of intellect, with the imperfect intellects o f his subjects, to pool experience and take counsel of one another; to the extent to w hich experience is cognate with reason, one can say that here the head and members are form ing a fairly rational corpus misticum (if rationality can be a matter of degree at all). There is, however, a shift of emphasis, perceptible and important in the Jacobean mind, aw ay from counsel and toward statecraft. If, at the point where king and people meet in imperfection of intellect, the people are thought of as desirous, fearful, and perplexed, the king is not only exercising a 36 Wilkes, pp. 78-82 (stanzas 171-91). 35 3

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thunderous authority over them, not m erely pooling their experience with his prudence, but also practicing upon them arcane arts of manipulation.37 T o do this he must possess arts unknown to them; he must perhaps know things about their natures which they do not know themselves; but since it is possible to conceive that his authority is the effect of an imperfection of intellect from which he is not himself exempt, and the arts of his statecraft arcane even to him, it is also con­ ceivable that he might, when meeting with his estates, be manipulated as well as manipulator, and the head and members engaged in a com­ petitive exercise of statecraft upon one another. But here the Tudor passion for descending authority interposed a most effective obstacle; such a thing could be thought of only to be denounced; but we can see that if the point were ever reached where it must be admitted that the estates were practicing an active and effective statecraft of their own, and that the arcana imperii had become available to the few and the many, the only means of remoralising the corpus misticum would be to reconstitute it as a republic, in the proper sense of a partnership between different modes of virtue and intelligence. Such a republic might be seen as a response, even more effective than monarchically descending authority, to the imperfection of intellect and the disorder of time; or it might be seen as the restoration of the golden age “ before the tymes of story.” T o the subjects of James I, however, such a con­ ceptual— let alone actual— reconstitution of the realm was as good as inconceivable. It was, then, possible to incorporate elements of civic and even Machiavellian thought with the dominant paradigm of monarchy. As the descending authority of the prince met with the civic capacity of the estates, these could be thought o f as contributing either their experience or their activity— and as the two houses of parliament learned increasingly to take the initiative, the latter became increas­ ingly apparent. There was an upper house embodying the nobility, a low er house representing the commonalty, and no shortage of clas­ sically based language in which these might appropriately be termed the few and the many; and there is consequently no great need to establish the first occasions on which it was said that English govern­ ment associated the monarchy with the aristocracy and the democracy in w ays approved b y the best philosophers of antiquity.38 So long as 37 Hence perhaps the contemporary fascination with the moral problem of how far a king might dissimulate with an unmoral subject, short of actually lying to him. See George L. Mosse, The H oly Pretence: A Study in Christianity and Rea­ son of State from William Perkins to John Wi?ithrop (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, l 957) where Puritan and Machiavellian lines of thought are shown converging. 38 Corinne Comstock Weston, English Constitutional Theory and the House of Lords (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 9-23. 354

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authority remained essentially with the king, however, his need to con­ sult or even treat with the nobility and the commons remained merely prudential, and language savoring of the mixed government o f Aristotle and Polybius was technically inappropriate. It was nevertheless far from unknown, and we shall see that when the monarchical paradigm collapsed and the king was forced to admit that, whether of force or of right, he shared his authority with others, terminology was already available for characterizing the government of England as a balanced relationship of king, lords, and commons. T he important point here, however, is that a normative theory of balanced or mixed government was incompatible with T udor notions of descending authority, and that the elements of republican theory were therefore best adapted to dealing with im perfectly legitimized situations. A king was likely to appear most Machiavellian where there were fewest laws, or even arcana, to guide him, and where the inde­ pendent wills of the upper or lower estates were most active and least guided b y legitimate authority. It was consequently in the study of statecraft that Jacobean intellects were most likely to lay hold upon those elements of the republican tradition which ascribed distinctive characteristics— interests, humors, particulari— to kings, nobilities and peoples, and considered how these might conflict or be reconciled. The concern with secondary causes, often presented as a distinguishing mark o f Jacobean historiography, might arise in this w ay and, to the extent that it did, would appear Machiavellian and skeptical rather than sanguine and scientific. T he most recent authority on the writings of Sir W alter Ralegh desires to exclude T he Maxims o f State— as T he Cabinet Coimcil was excluded earlier— from the canon of works composed b y Ralegh, while conceding the possibility that it was found among his papers “ et faisai[t] partie de sa documentation.” 39 There is no reason to suppose the same of The Cabinet Council, though the latter seems to be b y a contemporary and perhaps b y a minor courtier;40 but if Ralegh knew The Maxims of State, he knew a w ork in which the classical types of government, both good and bad, simple and mixed, are set out and enlarged b y the distinction of monarchies into hereditary and elective, absolute and mixed, inherited and acquired b y conquest, and in which means are considered for the preservation of every type and divided into “ rules,” which are ethically centered, and “ sophisms,” which are not. T he Maxims o f State alludes to Machiavelli with disapproval, but any contemporary reader would see that it was “ Machiavellian” in the 39 Pierre Lefranc, Sir Walter Ralegh Ecrivain (Paris: Armand Colin, 1968), pp. 67-70. 40 Lefranc, p. 64. 355

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sense that it was a w ork of ragione di stato, in which intelligence was applied to the preservation of unsanctioned as well as sanctioned forms of rule. W hat is striking is the amount of attention paid to the distribu­ tion of arms in ways appropriate to monarchies, aristocracies and popu­ lar states;41 for we have learned to consider this a characteristic of works written in the Florentine tradition, where the distribution of arms was among the most important “ secondary causes” of the preva­ lence of aristocracy or democracy, liberty or corruption; and evidence of prior theoretical study b y Ralegh on this theme would be of value in explaining its prominence in The Prerogative o f Parliaments, the most challenging and original of the political works accepted as b y his hand. This dialogue between a councilor of state and a justice of the peace, both of whom have served in the House of Commons, is the first among several analyses of the disordered relations between Stuart kings and their parliaments, with which we shall be concerned because of the “ Machiavellian” character of their social analysis.42 An ironical and enigmatic quality pervades the whole work, with the councillor becoming increasingly overbearing and corrupt; and it is assumed throughout that prudence, rather than justice in the obligatory sense, enjoins the king to consult the wishes of his parliaments, aiming at keeping them attached to him while himself retaining complete free­ dom of action. Yet there is no need to suppose anything ironical about Ralegh’s acceptance of royal authority as legitimate; he merely accepts that its nature is such that it cannot be exercised except b y means that must be ironically regarded, that is to say by statecraft. The king gov­ erns b y art; that is, he governs in a world which is not to be perfectly known, which is therefore mutable and a prey to secondary causes. It is in this context that we learn from Ralegh that part of the king’s prob­ lems in dealing with his parliaments lies in the decay of the private m ilitary power form erly possessed by great nobles. The maintenance of arms and soldiers is now a matter for the public authority, and the public purse.43 Here we are without doubt looking, from one angle, at a direct awareness possessed by Englishmen of changes going on in their social and political life. Everyone knew about the wars of York and Lancas­ ter, fought b y armies which followed great magnates and overmighty subjects; and in the absence of any dominant literary paradigm to account for knowledge of retainers and “ bastard feudalism,” we must accept the documentary evidence which suggests that there was a true oral tradition conveying the memory of these fairly recent phenomena. 41 Oldys and Birch (eds.), The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh, Kt. (Oxford: at the University Press, 1829), v iii , 1-36. 42 Ibid., 157-221. 43 Ibid., pp. 163, 183-85. 356

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Down until the late seventeenth century, cases can be found of speeches and pamphlets alluding to “ blue coats” and “ coats and badges” in w ays which indicate that the audience knew of these marks of livery which gentlemen had once worn to show their dependence upon great lords, and that it took little pleasure in being reminded.44 But Ralegh, like others, is clearly employing the statement that magnates have lost their former military power in order to develop the general hypothesis that a change has taken place in the social and political relations between king, nobility, and people; and while this passage in The Prerogative o f Parliaments forms part of an increasing historical aware­ ness that England possessed a feudal past, the Florentine tradition of regarding the distribution of arms as an index to the distribution of political capacity furnishes the appropriate paradigmatic context for the growth of ideas about the significance of this past in explaining English political change. Ralegh knew his Machiavelli; and Francis Bacon, who also knew him to a degree which might have been dis­ cussed at much greater length, not only alludes— both in his History of H enry V II and in his Essays— to the emancipation of the yeomanry from m ilitary dependence on their lords, but discusses, in contexts emphasizing empire, expansion, and the greatness of states, the idea that infantry form the nerve of an arm y.45 He was tapping the tradition— most authoritatively stated by Fortescue— of contrasting the sturdiness of English yeomen with the misery of French peasants, and suggesting that what made the former tough fighters also made them difficult to tax and govern without their consent;40 but once this tradition was stated in a Machiavellian context, it must seem as if made for it. There were, then, elements of Machiavellism in Jacobean thought: elements, that is, of a “ machiavellian” account of the English polity, depicting it as a one, few and many held together b y arms, statecraft, and moral ambiguity. From such an account it might not be too long a step to recommending its reconstitution on the higher (if still not unambiguous) moral level of the republic. But only the breakdown of m onarchy and civil w ar permitted such a step to be actually taken. So long as descending authority met with ascending custom, the king’s 44 E.g., Andrew Marvell, A n Account of the Grow th of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England . . . (London, 1677), pp. 74-81: “ It is as well known among them”—i.e., factious members of the House of Commons—“to what Lord each of them retaine, as when formerly they wore Coats and Badges.” See also Henry Neville, below, p. 418. 45 Bacon, “ History of the Reign of King Henry V II,” W orks, vi, 93-95; “ Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates,” vi, 446-47. N . Orsini, Bacone e Machia­ velli (Genoa, 1936), remains an important study of this relationship. 46 Fortescue, ed. Plummer, The Governance of England (London: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 1926), pp. 137-42. 357

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obligation to respect the privileges of his subjects remained prudential; it was not the consequence of a division and sharing of authority between him and them. John Pym , the future leader of revolution, impeaching Manwaring in 1628 for stating the descending thesis so strongly as to suggest that the sovereign had right to every man’s goods, used language which revealed this in an interesting w ay. He said: T he form of government is that which doth actuate and dispose every part and member of a state to the common good; and as those parts give strength and ornament to the whole, so they receive from it again strength and protection in their several stations and degrees. If this mutual relation and intercourse be broken, the whole frame w ill quickly be dissolved, and fall in pieces, and instead of this con­ cord and interchange of support, whilst one part seeks to uphold the old form of government, and the other part to introduce a new, they will miserably consume and devour one another. Histories are full of the calamities of whole states and nations in such cases. It is true that time must needs bring some alterations, and every alteration is a step and degree towards a dissolution; those things only are eter­ nal which are constant and uniform. Therefore it is observed b y the best writers upon this subject that those commonwealths have been most durable and perpetual which have often reformed and recom­ posed themselves according to their first institution and ordinance, for b y this means they repair the breaches and counterwork the ordi­ nary and natural effects of time.47 P ym ’s language blends hierarchy with republic. On the one hand, there is a “ great chain of being” which can be thrown into disorder by the defection of any one link from its due place or degree; on the other, the chain is a “ whole,” its members parts and their participation far enough from the observance of a static order to be termed “ mutual relation and intercourse . . . concord and interchange of support” ; and the resistance of order to the naturally debilitating effects of time is to consist of a Machiavellian ridurre ai principii. But it is still unclear whether this is to be more than the reconstitution of the hierarchy. The language is close to suggesting that the king is one of the parts of the whole, in which case it would become necessary to specify what he, and what each other part, contributes toward the “ mutual . . . inter­ course” which would in turn become a partnership in shared govern­ ment. But Pym does not seem to be taking this crucial step from mixed monarchy to mixed government. T h e language of degree guards him 47 Quoted in J. P. Kenyon (ed.), The Stuart Constitution, 1603-1688 (Cam­ bridge University Press, 1966), p. 17.

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from taking it, and the ridurre ai principii could consist of the mainte­ nance of ancient custom as well as of “ priority and place.” He goes on: There are plain footsteps of those laws in the government of the Saxons; they were of that vigour and force as to overlive the Con­ quest, nay, to give bounds and limits to the Conqueror, whose vic­ tory gave him first hope. But the assurance and possession of the Crown he obtained b y composition, in which he bound himself to observe these and the other ancient laws and liberties of the kingdom, which afterwards he likewise confirmed b y oath at his coronation. From him the said obligation descended to his successors. It is true they have been often broken, they have been often confirmed by charters of kings, b y acts of parliaments, but the petitions of the subjects upon which those charters and acts were founded were ever petitions of right, demanding their ancient and due liberties, not suing for any new.48 Here is the m ythology of the Ancient Constitution, in 1628 at a high tide with the great debate over the Petition of Right to which Pym alludes. But if the liberties of the subject were rooted in custom and birthright, property and inheritance— the mechanisms of antiquity— they could not arise from, or entail, any sharing of positive authority between king and people. Pym was successful enough in arguing that the king had not made, and implying that he had not granted or con­ ceded, the liberties; but that is all which separates him from the argu­ ment to be used by W entw orth six months later, in which descending authority and ascending liberty have only degree and custom to unite them. Princes are to be indulgent, nursing fathers to their people; their modest liberties, their sober rights, ought to be precious in their eyes; the branches of their government be for shadow, for habitation, the com fort of life, repose, safe and still under the protection of their sceptres. Subjects on the other side ought with solicitous eyes of jealousy to watch over the prerogatives of a crow n; the authority of a king is the keystone which closeth up the arch of order and government, which contains each part in due relation to the whole, and which once shaken . . . all the frame falls together. . . . V erily, these are those mutual intelligences of love and protection descend­ ing, and loyalty ascending, which should pass . . . between a king and his people. Their faithful servants must look equally on both: weave, twist these two together in all their counsels; study, labour to preserve each without diminishing or enlarging either, and by run­ 48 Ibid. 359

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ning in the worn, wonted channels, treading the ancient bounds, cut off early all disputes from between them. For whatever he be that ravels forth into questions the right of a king and of a people, shall never be able to wrrap them up again into the comeliness and order he found. . . ,49 The disputes were not cut off, and the questions were not wrapped up again; but only when debates of this order had become utterly unmanageable did reformulations of the English political order in either republican or Machiavellian terms become more than the expression of a private alienation like that of Ralegh. Once it was admitted that the partnership of authority and liberty had broken down, it could be admitted that government was a sharing of power in a Polybian mixed constitution, and the w ay was open for further conceptual explora­ tions. But the admission was made reluctantly, by minds clinging to the vocabularies of m onarchy and common law; and even after the breach was made, the minds that moved out on to the fortune-tossed waters of republican theory did so under the guidance of theologically based concepts, of casuistry and apocalyptic, which did much to prevent and divert the development of Machiavellian categories of thought. W e shall see that English Machiavellism appeared— as Machiavelli’s own thinking had done— in the defeat of a chiliastic revolution; but we shall also find that there was an unexpected sequel. 49 Kenyon, pp. 18-19.

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T H E A N G LIC IZ A T IO N OF T H E REPU BLIC a)

Mixed Constitution, Saint and Citizen

[i] 21 j u n e 1642, w i t h a b o u t t w o m o n t h s to go before the formal beginnings of civil war, two of Charles I’s advisers— Viscount Falk­ land and Sir John Colepeper— drafted, and persuaded him to issue, a document in which the king, not parliament, took the step of declar­ ing England a mixed government rather than a condescending mon­ archy. H is M ajesty's A nsw er to the N ineteen Propositions o f Both Houses o f Parliament, as has been emphatically and correctly asserted b y Corinne C. W eston,1 is a crucial document in English political thought, and among other things one of a series of keys which opened the door to Machiavellian analysis. In essence, it asserts that the gov­ ernment of England is vested in three estates, the king, the lords, and the commons, and that the health and the very survival of the system depend upon maintenance of the balance between them. This drastic departure from the thesis of descending authority was both constitu­ tionally incorrect and a disastrous tactical error in royalist polemic; but it was, in a very short time, so w idely accepted and so diversely employed as to present us with a clear case of paradigmatic innova­ tion— here, we must believe, was a new formulation of a kind for which many men had been searching for many reasons. T he crucial fact is that the crisis making civil w ar imminent in June 1642 could no longer be seen as arising from the collision of author­ ity with custom, or prerogative with privilege, but from a far more disruptive series of rifts in what all could now perceive as the nerve cen­ ter of English government— the conjoined authority of king and parlia­ ment. T he House of Commons, having forced through much legisla­ tion against the king’s wishes, were now close to claiming the right to issue ordinances without his consent; they were demanding that conon

1 See above, ch. x, n. 38. The question of authorship is discussed on pp. 26-27, following Clarendon, who stressed Colepeper’s role rather than Falkland’s. It may be remarked, however, that Falkland was an intellectual—and a friend of Claren­ don’s, who disapproved of the document—and that Colepeper was not. 3 61

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trol of the county militia should be placed in their hands, and that they should possess at least a veto over the king’s choice of counselors. Faced w ith these demands, the framers of the A nsw er to the N ineteen Propo­ sitions differed from monarchical tradition, from their colleagues, and in the long run from the king himself, in their willingness to concede that the problem was not one of adjusting descending to ascending authority, but one of sharing specifiable powers, and to represent the government of England as a sharing of power. In this willingness they wrote: There being three kinds of government among men, absolute mon­ archy, aristocracy and democracy, and all these having their partic­ ular conveniences and inconveniences, the experience and wisdom of your ancestors hath so moulded this out of a mixture of these acts as to give to this kingdom (as far as humane prudence can contrive) the conveniences of all three, without the inconveniences of any one, as long as the balance hangs even between the three estates, and they run jointly on in their proper channel (begetting verdure and fer­ tility in the meadows on both sides) and the overflowing of either on either side raise no deluge or inundation. The ill of absolute mon­ archy is tyranny, the ill of aristocracy is faction and division, the ills of dem ocracy are tumults, violence and licentiousness. T he good of monarchy is the uniting a nation under one head to resist invasion from abroad and insurrection at home; the good of aristocracy is the conjunction of counsel in the ablest persons of a state for the public benefit; the good of dem ocracy is liberty, and the courage and indus­ try which liberty begets.2 T he king— as his adversaries remarked with glee and his friends with dismay3— was here made to describe himself as a part of his own realm, one of three “ estates” between which there must be balance and (it follow ed) proportionate equality. But the implications of the language above reach farther still. Government in England is no longer a direct emanation of divinely or rationally enjoined authority; it is a contriv­ ance of human prudence, blending together three modes of govern­ ment— the only three that can exist— each of which possesses its characteristic virtues and vices (w e have to remember that the words “ conveniences” and “ inconveniences” were far less low-keyed in seven­ teenth-century speech than they are now ). This blend is a balance, an association in which each partner contributes its particular virtue, while 2 A modernized text is in Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, pp. 21-23. Cf. Weston, Appendix 1, pp. 263-65. 3 The earlier reactions to the Answer are studied by Weston, pp. 27-50.

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inviting the others to check its particular vice. The government of England, in short, without ceasing to manifest the element of mon­ archy, is being presented as a classical republic; and w e catch a glimpse of M achiavelli’s im agery of fortune. The three elements constitute a river, that ancient symbol of time: while it runs in its proper channel, bringing richness and fertility, the themes of order and descending grace are still being invoked; but once we hear that the balance is nec­ essary to prevent “ deluge and inundation,” the river has become that of fortune, against which princes and republics erect dykes b y the aid of virtue. T he framers of the A nsw er were, we shall shortly see, placing them­ selves in a position to appeal to the Lords against the Commons; but, with a far more lasting resonance, they were intimating that English government was a balance of the only three elements out of which government could be constructed, and that outside that balance lay only disorder. W e have seen enough of republican theory b y this time to know that such a balance must be one of virtues and of powers. T he virtues, and the corresponding vices, of the three components have already been stated; what of the powers? From the words last quoted, the A nsw er to the N ineteen Propositions goes on: In this kingdom the laws are jointly made by a king, b y a house of peers, and b y a house of commons chosen by the people, all hav­ ing free votes and particular privileges. The government according to these laws is trusted to the king; power of treaties of war and peace, of making peers, of choosing officers and counsellors for state . . . and some more of the like kind are placed in the king. And this kind of regulated monarchy, having this power to preserve that authority without which it would be disabled to preserve the laws in their force and the subjects in their liberties and properties, is intended to draw to him such a respect and relation from the great ones as m ay hinder the ills of division and faction, and such a fear and reverence from the people as may hinder tumults, violence and licentiousness. Again, that the prince may not make use of this high and perpetual power to the hurt of those for whose good he hath i t . . . the House of Commons (an excellent conserver of liberty, but never intended for any share in government, or the choosing of them that should govern) is solely entrusted with the first propositions concerning the levies of monies (which is the sinews as well of peace as w ar). . . . And the Lords, being trusted with a judicatory power, are an excellent screen and bank between the prince and people, to assist each against any encroachments of the other[s], and b y just 363

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judgements to preserve that law which ought to be the rule of every one of the three. . . .4 It was, as we already know, a recurrent problem in Aristotelian theory to relate specific political functions to elements defined b y their virtues; and in the case of English government, the problem was to prove peculiarly recalcitrant. The legislative power, being lodged in the trinity-in-unity of king-in-parliament, could not be further employed in distinguishing between the powers supposedly allotted to the three elements; and we notice how, in the passage just quoted, it is easier to state how each may check the excesses of the others than to specify just what powers the lords and commons wield. In stating that the House of Lords is “ entrusted with a judicatory power,” however, the framers of the Answ er, while perhaps intending little more than an allusion to their role in impeachments, have given voice to a durable belief that the lords are peculiarly fitted to arbitrate, to trim the bal­ ance, to act as a supreme court of constitutional law or as Machiavelli’s guardia della liberta (a Giannottian signore they cannot be). This in turn appears in retrospect a step toward the later theory which equated “ mixed government” with “ separation of powers,” assigning to the lords a judicial function while seeking to separate executive, judiciary, and legislative in a w ay which clearly revealed how Aristotelian analy­ sis was bedeviled by English parliamentary monarchy. The doctrine that king, lords, and commons together constituted a marvelously equilibrated and gloriously successful distribution of pow ­ ers was to be endlessly celebrated throughout the eighteenth century; but the purpose of the A nsw er to the N ineteen Propositions was mina­ tory, not congratulatory; it was intended less to offer a new and gen­ erally acceptable theory of the constitution than to warn Englishmen that nothing but the balance of the three estates stood between them and anarchy. In language diminishingly coherent, the document goes on to warn that any surrender to the demand for parliamentary con­ trol of the king’s choice of counselors will beget eternal factions and dissensions (as destructive to public happi­ ness as w ar), both in the chosen, and in the Houses that chose them, and the people who chose the choosers, since so new a power will undoubtedly intoxicate persons who were not born to it, and beget not only divisions among them as equals, but in them contempt of us, as become an equal to them, and insolence and injustice towards our people, as now so much their inferiors, which will be the more grievous unto them, as suffering from those who were so lately of a nearer degree to themselves, and being to have redress only from 4 Kenyon, pp. 21-22.

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those that placed them, and fearing they may be inclined to preserve what they have made, both out of kindness and policy, since all great changes are extremely inconvenient, and almost infallibly beget yet greater changes, which beget vet greater inconveniences.5 The Machiavellian overtones are audible enough to warn us that there is more here than the familiar rhetoric of anarchy following the destruction of subordination and degree. Similarly in what follows, when we hear that at last the common people . . . set up for themselves, call parity and independence liberty, devour that estate which had devoured the rest, destroy all rights and proprieties, all distinctions of families and merit, and by this means this splendid and excellently distinguished form of government end [si in a dark, equal chaos of confusion, and the long line of our many noble ancestors in a Ja ck Cade or a W at T y le r,6 it is obvious enough who is to be frightened of whom; but this is not simply the appeal of Shakespeare’s Ulysses. The king’s subjects are being warned, not merely that they must observe due subordination, but that nothing stands between them and these hcrrors but the mainte­ nance of a balance which men have made. T o offend against degree is to offend against a divinely ordered universe, and “ the powers above” may “ put on their instruments” for some terrible judgment and restoration;7 but to offend against balance may be to go out into a mindless chaos where nothing reigns except fortune and the treading of the wheel. The theory of the mixed constitution was imported into English political rhetoric in order to naturalize there the Polybian and Machiavellian doctrine of the republic, in which the virtues of all may neutralize the vices from which none is free, but which is historically fragile and may be overthrown at the slightest departure from balance. The alternative and opposite to balance is fortune and may be corrup­ tion; but there is an important difference between the Florentine and the English functions of this antithesis. The Florentines opted for the republic because it was in their nature to do so, and found fortune their enemy, virtue and balance their only defenses; but the English, mon­ archical and customary animals by nature, took up the rhetoric of bal­ ance and republic only because their traditional constitution was threat­ ened by disorder in such a form — a dispute over the sharing of power— as to make this an appropriate response. In consequence older levels of rhetoric remained apparent; the language of order and degree was still outw ardly dominant, and the suggestion that disorder had taken the 5 Kenyon, p. 22.

6 Kenyon, p. 23. 36 5

7 Macbeth, iv, 3, 278-79.

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form of fortune was operative but partially concealed within it. All this, as we shall next see, further concealed the naked opposition of fortuna and virtu to which the logic of republican rhetoric might otherwise have led. If the citizen’s republic collapsed about him, he might be left with his personal integrity so far bereft of social reinforcement in a world of changing particulars that only an act of divine grace might suffice to fo rtify him; and if this was not forthcoming, his only recourse might be to Machiavellian virtu or Guicciardinian prudence in their least comfortable forms. As the Englishman’s Ancient Constitution col­ lapsed about him, its fragility was indeed dramatized b y presentation in a quasi-republican shape. But not only was it far from occurring to Calvinists and Arminians alike that grace might fail them; their responses were still fortified b y the imageries of custom, of degree, and o f a universe still both God-centered and monarchical. A simply Machiavellian response was hardly to be expected. Civil W ar thought is to a large degree casuist; it asks where the individual’s duty lies when the legitimate authorities under which he has lived are locked in con­ flict; and classical republicanism, one w ay of projecting this problem, was not the only w ay of seeking to solve it. In A Treatise o f M onarchy (16 4 3), the sensitive moderate Philip Hunton, taking his cue in part from the A nsw er to the Nineteen Propositions, accepted the premise that England’s was a mixed govern­ ment and indicated how far this was seen as a republic b y alluding to the problem— raised for Florentines b y the case of Venice— that there was no legislator involved in its foundation. It was marvelous to him, he remarked, that the wits of men in rude and unpolished times could have contrived so delicate a balance.8 But when he turned to the prob­ lems of duty and allegiance raised b y the breakdown of balance in civil war, he discovered that there was no ready-made answer. If constitu­ tional law was the fruit of collaboration between three powers, among whom legitimate authority was distributed, there could be no constitu­ tional law which directed allegiance to any one of the three in the event of conflict between them; if any one did possess such an author­ ity, then (Hunton pushes the point far past Giannotti) it lay outside 8 Hunton, A Treatise of Monarchy (London, 1643), p. 44: “what ever more then humane wisedom had the contriving of it, whether done at once, or by degrees found out and perfected, I conceive it unparalleld for exactnesse of true policy in the whole world; such a care for the Soveraignty of the Monarch, such a provision for the liberty of the People, and that one may bee justly allayed, and yet consist without impeachment of the other, that I wonder how our Forefathers in those rude unpolisht times could attain such an accurate composure.”

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the balance and the latter could never have existed.9 From this premise, many discussants were to draw the conclusion reached b y Sir Robert Filmer (and earlier b y Bodin): a mixed government was an anarchy, indeed an absurdity.10 Hunton, writing as a casuist rather than a polemi­ cal theorist, takes another and an equally significant path. Mixed gov­ ernment is legitimate in England, but it has broken down. T h e individ­ ual is consequently without any legitimate authority in the form of positive law, to tell him how to act or what side to choose; but he is under an imperative, moral as well as practical, obliging him to act and choose. He must now employ his judgment as to the facts and his con­ science as to the issues, and act as these direct him.11 It is clear that, as to the outcome, he is in the hand of God and might almost be said to be appealing to that judge. Hunton’s argument has therefore reminded scholars12 of the “ appeal to heaven” which appears in Locke’s Treatises of G overnm ent, some forty years later; but there are differences. In the first place, Hunton presupposes a conscience inhabiting a world of disordered legitimacy, whose fragments may be partly reassembled b y a scrupulous casuistry. 9 Hunton, p. 69: “T o demand which Estate may challenge this power of finall determination of Fundamentall controversies arising betwixt them is to demand which of them shall be absolute: For I conceive that in the first part hereof, I have made it good, that this finall utmost controversie arising betwixt the three Legislative Estates, can have no legall, constituted Judge in a mixed government: for in such difference he who affirmes that the people are bound to follow the Judgement of the King against that of the Parliament, destroyes the mixture into absolutenesse: And he who affirms that they are bound to cleave to the Judge­ ment of the two Houses against that of the King, resolves the Monarchic into an Aristocracie or Democracie, according as he places this finall Judgement. Whereas I take it to be an evident truth, that in a mixed government no power is to be attributed to either Estate, which directly, or by necessary consequence, destroyes the liberty of the other.” See also pp. 28-29. 10 Sir Robert Filmer, The Anarchy of a Limited or M ixed Mo?iarchy (1648), in Laslett (ed.), Patriarcha and Other Political Writings of Sir Robert Filmer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949). 11 Hunton, p. 73: “If it be demanded then, how this cause can be decided? and which way must the People turne in such a contention? I answere, If the non-decision be tolerable; it must remaine undecided, whiles the Principle of legall decision is thus divided, and by that division each suspends the others power. If it be such as is destructive, and necessitates a determination, this must be made evident; and then every Person must aide that Part, which in his best Reason and Judgement stands for publike good, against the destructive. And the Lawes and Government which he stands for, and is sworne to justifies and beares him out in it, yea; bindes him to it.” 12 A. H. Maclean, “ George Lawson and John Locke,” Cambridge Historical Journal 9, no. 1 (1947), 69-77, and “The Origins of the Political Opinions of John Locke,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, 1947.

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If the conscience seeks to assess the political situation and its immedi­ ate past history, it must employ the methods of political and moral prudence to determine what has happened, what might have happened, and what should be done now; and since this presupposes objective standards of morality and law, the conscience is as far from Machiavel­ lian virtu in one direction as it is from Locke in another. But in the second place, heaven has not made its will known by prior endorse­ ment of any specific form of authority,13 so that the individual, taking his stand on conscience in the midst of civil war, may well be appeal­ ing— whether or not he draws the sword himself (Hunton goes on to propose means of reconciliation)14— to jus gladii or jus conquestus, to the judgment of heaven as expressed in the outcome of a trial by battle. There was an extensive contemporary literature of this appeal proce­ dure, which Hunton does not use, but to which we may refer at this point. Should the verdict go against him, he may conclude that he has been proved w rong; but if his conscience still assures him that he made a justified choice, he may reflect that the judgments of providence are too deep to be found out. The conquering sword, for its part, may go so far as to claim not only a providential, but a prophetic and apoca­ lyptic authority for what it does with its victory.15 L ocke’s appeal to heaven is an appeal to the sword, but it is lodged by a people, not by a congeries of individual consciences. Hunton clearly does not think of the people as in any w ay incorporated except b y the orders of the republic, or mixed government, which have now broken down and left each man on his own.16 The republic, we observe, is no covenant, uniting a people b y making them one with God, nor is it a social compact incorporating them by rational and non-Sinaitic processes; it is a human construct, blending imperfect ele­ ments into an equilibrium, and for Hunton it is a conservative and legitimating device as well. A fter it comes conscience; but if the people had in any prior sense been incorporated, the appeal to heaven would have been predetermined. H enry Parker, the most formidable parlia­ mentary apologist of the First Civil W ar,17 exploits every opportunity offered him b y the A nsw er to the Nineteen Propositions to show that royal authority, being coordinate, is not preeminent; but when he comes to the question of where the individual’s allegiance is to lie in 13 Hunton, p. 4. 14 Hunton, pp. 77-79. 15 For this see John M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 22-28. 16 Hunton, p. 73 and above, n. 11. 17 On him see W . K. Jordan, Me?i of Substance: A Study of the Thought of Two English Revolutionaries, Henry Parker and Henry Robinson (Chicago Uni­ versity Press, 1942).

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civil war, he argues that the people are indissolubly incorporated in parliament. There is, says Parker, a “ reason of state” which must be kept entirely distinct from anything in Machiavelli (he seems to have thought that Machiavelli had propounded a doctrine under that name). This is nothing other than the natural and rational impulse of any body of persons to become a body politic, or state; it is “ reason” of state because for men to act rationally is to act politically; and on the premise that parliament represents the people, their will to be a people can be expressed nowhere but in that body.18 The individual in time of civil war, then, need not consult his conscience and appeal to the arbitra­ ment of providence. He need only consult his reason, which will direct him to incorporate himself in parliament. An Aristotelian populism of this kind could plainly have the effect of disrupting mixed government altogether and substituting a demo­ cratic sovereignty; but, as with other Civil W ar writers,19 the question arises whether Parker had a normal or an emergency sovereignty in mind. He might, that is, have thought of mixed government as suffi­ ciently descriptive of the normal state of affairs, and have regarded “ reason of state” simply as that which came into play when the norms had collapsed and the state was obliged to reconstitute itself, reassert­ ing as it did so its claim to the allegiance of individuals. “ Reason of state” in that sense would be a far cry from the intelligence of L y cu r­ gus or any Machiavellian ordi?iatore\ Parker is no kind of classical republican; but it would accord interestingly with the possibility that, like Hunton, he accepts the mixed constitution in order to say that when it collapses, the individual is alone and must move to reorder his life by the discovery of something in himself. In Hunton’s scheme this is conscience; in Parker’s a predetermined political rationality; but from “ reason of state” it is a short step to salus populi suprema lex ,20 a for­ mula whose implications might easily appear premoral. Before moral norms could exist, it might be said, res publica, populus or status must exist; consequently the first command of reason was that something by one of these names should be, and its institution could not be carried out b y acts subject to the norms which it alone could commend. This thought of course lay behind all that Machiavelli had had to say about 18 Parker, Observations upon Some of His Majesties Late Answers and Expresses (1642), pp. 15-16, 22-24, 34. For his denunciations of Machiavelli, see pp. 2, 10, 19, 20. 19 E.g., Prynne; see Lamont, Marginal Prynne, 85-118. 20 Parker, Observations, pp. 3-4: “ . . . the transcendent of all Politiques . . . the Paramount Law that shall give Law to all humane Lawes whatsoever, and that is Salus Populi. . . . The Charter of nature intitles all Subjects of all Countries what­ soever to safetie by its supreame Law. . . 369

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the nonmoral imperatives laid upon the legislator; but we are upon a rather different path here. The individual, assailed by civil war and seeking to reconstitute his allegiance, is no legislator, since his aim is to subject himself to authority rather than to found and rule a city; but he may visualize himself as forced back into a prepolitical and premoral situation, seeking that in himself which will reestablish order. The entity whose salus is suprema lex is now not populus but ego; he may make a Cartesian discovery that his first movement as an active being must be to assert and perpetuate himself, or a Christian and Calvinist discovery that, having been created to an end unfixed b y him, b y a being of whom he knows nothing, his first duty is to preserve himself to that end. He m ay now locate himself in a state of “ nature,” antedat­ ing society, covenant or revelation, and seek means of constituting an intelligible authority-structure, starting with nothing more than a pri­ mal impulse and duty to preserve himself. If he follows this path, he is less likely to emerge as Lycurgus establishing a republic than as the natural man erecting and obeying an artificial Leviathan. Hobbes, not an English Machiavelli, is the radical master of Civil W ar political thought; the English individual, when stripped of all protection and legitimation and reduced to the extreme of prepolitical dereliction, was liable to establish himself in the state of nature, not under the dominion of fortune. This is in a sense an index to his resourcefulness, and to the difficulty of stripping him of all means of self-legitimation; but the important difference between Hobbesian and Machiavellian man is that the state of nature is ahistorical and logically timeless, whereas every moment on the rotating wheel forms one of a sequence in time. Th e anakukldsis is w holly secular and time-bound, and nowhere intersects the state of nature; this indeed was a principal reason for deeming it atheistic; but the recourse to the state of nature— capable though it was of being described in terms which struck con­ temporaries as close to atheism— was a movement out of time, followed b y a return to politics and history. O nly b y invoking a prophetic God could Hobbes make it clear that every moment, even the moment of nature, was in history.21 But the complex arm ory of ideas that takes shape along the line leading from Parker to Leviathan provides yet another set of reasons w h y the individual isolated b y the collapse of the mixed constitution need not define himself in terms of a Machia­ vellian polarity. Mixed government— the term which rendered it possible for the king’s subjects to accept the republican tradition— was supposed to 21 Leviathan, Books h i and iv. See Pocock, “Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes,” in Politics, Language and Tim e, pp. 148-201.

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ensure stability b y setting up an equilibrium of virtues and powers. T he enemy of balance was fortune, and the enemy of fortune was virtue; in this case, one would expect, the virtue of respecting the virtue of other parties to the equilibrium. But the paradigm of mixed govern­ ment, though it defined the moment of breakdown as one of individual isolation and dereliction, did not oblige the individual to define that moment in terms of fortune and virtue. In the first place, there were too many alternative vocabularies. Hunton’s moment, of conscience and the appeal to heaven, was capable of being developed in the direc­ tion explored by John M. W allace,22 in which a prudential submission to the will of providence rose to heights of sophisticated and latitudinarian piety; Parker’s moment, of reason of state and salus populi, in the direction explored b y Quentin Skinner, where prudence and provi­ dence gave w ay to the radical naturalism of Hobbes.23 Others, like W illiam Prynne, dealt with the problem b y pitting Ancient Constitu­ tion against Elect Nation, and did not employ a quasi-republican rheto­ ric at all. In the second place, it may well seem that the individual who saw the Civil W ar as posing a problem in casuistry and allegiance would not affirm his virtue in terms strong enough to expose it immedi­ ately to fortune; virtue, when all is said and done, is an ideal of action, not m erely of legitimation. T o understand how the classical ideal of the citizen came to play its role in Interregnum thinking, we have still some w ay to go and must travel a route of utterances less apologetic and more activist; but the irreducible conservatism of the period will continue to have something to say to us.

[ii] Robert, Lord Brooke, encouraging his officers in 1643 to appear in arms against the K in g in the name of king and parliament, referred to “ that great commonwealthman of the Romans, Cicero,” 24 and such words as “ commonwealthman” and “ patriot” were indeed used now and again to denote those who could think of king, parliament, and 22 Above, n. 15. 23 Skinner, “Hobbes’s Leviathan,” Historical Journal 7, no. 2 (1964), 321-32; “ History and Ideology in the English Revolution,” ibid. 8, no. 2 (1965), 151-78; “The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought,” ibid. 9, no. 3 (1966), 286-317, and revised version in Cranston and Peters (eds.), Hobbes and Rousseau (N ew York: Doubleday Anchor Book, 1972), pp. 102-42; “Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy,” in G . E. Aylmer (ed.), The Interregnum: the Quest for Settlement, 1646-1660 (London: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 79-98. 24 Robert E. L. Striver II, Robert Greville, Lord Brooke (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 68.

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people as forming a polity in which any part might be resisted and restrained in the name of the whole. But such language, though observ­ ably classical in its connotations, was hindered in its development by those other styles of thought we have been studying; there are clearly many grains of salt to be taken with Hobbes’s opinion that republican principles, imbibed at the universities and from Greek and Latin his­ tories, helped dispose men’s minds to civil w ar.25 W e have next to look at the languages prevalent in the great radical movements of the late 1640s; and here the crucial utterances are of course those to be found in the manifestos of the officers and soldiers of the army. In these a body of men of diverse social origins, having in common that they had been mobilized into a military society which had just won a civil war of an unprecedented kind, declared themselves to be self-motivated and self-reliant in matters both civil and religious. T h ey were, they said, “ not a mere mercenary army, hired to serve any arbitrary power of a state,” but were “ called forth . . . to the defence of our own and the people’s just rights and liberties.” And so we took up arms in judgment and conscience to those ends, and have so continued them, and are resolved according to . . . such principles as we have received from your [parliament’s! frequent informations, and our own common sense, concerning these our fundamental rights and liberties, to assert and vindicate . . . those common ends premised, against . . . all particular parties and interests whatsoever.2 These men, declaring a common sense that the arms they had taken up had engaged them to a common end, were declaring a political selfconsciousness of a kind unheard of in England before. T o do so was a revolutionary act, and it is not surprising that the documents employ and transcend every political language available to Englishmen in the attempt to make their statement. There is, for example, the appeal to ancient liberties, radicalized by the imputation that these have not been inherited, as the doctrine of the Ancient Constitution maintained, but have on the contrary been lost, since early but not forgotten times, and must now be restored.27 There is the appeal to salus populi suprema lex, but we shall penetrate deeper into the character of radical thought 25 Hobbes, Behemoth (ed. Tonnies, London, 1889; repr. London, Frank Cass, 1969), pp. 3, 23, 43. 2GA Representation of the Army (14 June 1647); Woodhouse, Puritaiiism a?jd Liberty (London: E. J. Dent, 1950), pp. 403-404. 27 T o neglect this distinction, as is still sometimes done, is to confuse the Ancient Constitution with the Norman Yoke; for the latter, see Christopher Hill, Puritan­ ism and Revolution, pp. 50-122. Cf. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 125-27. 372

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b y citing a document in which this is made in a very different spirit from Parker’s; the purpose being now not to make some ultimately conservative appeal to an irreducible principle of legitimation, but to assert that a people is itself and acts as itself before God. For G od hath given no man a talent to be wrapped up in a nap­ kin and not improved, but the meanest vassal (in the eye of the w orld) is equally obliged and acceptable to G od with the greatest prince or commander under the sun, in and for the use of that talent betrusted to him. . . . For, Sir, should you [Fairfax]— yea, should the whole parliament or kingdom— exempt us from this service, or . . . command our silence or forbearance, yet could not they nor you discharge us of our duties to G od or to our own natures. . . . And if b y any one your Excellency should be suborned that we are transgressors of all order and form, and in that sense to look upon us, we desire to mind your Excellency that the law of nature and of nations, attested in our public declarations and papers, m ay be an answer to such for the justification of our present expedient. For all forms are but as shadows, and subject to the end. And the safety of the people is above all forms, customs, etc.; and the equity of pop­ ular safety is the thing which justifieth all forms, or the change of forms, for the accomplishment thereof; and no forms are lawful longer than they preserve or accomplish the same.28 Here “ the safety of the people” is no premoral principle of socializa­ tion (as in “ it is expedient that one man die for the people” ). W ith the words “ all forms are but as shadows,” an appeal to “ the law of nature and of nations” moves out into the language of apocalyptic rinnovazione. One is not merely obliged to preserve one’s self, as cre­ ated to an end; the emphasis is transferred to the end itself and to the “ talent” which must be employed in pursuing it. And many readers of these words would interpret “ the safety of the people” as indicat­ ing not merely the material preservation of the community of endpursuing creatures, but the continued pursuit of that historic end to w hich a peculiar nation was elect. “ All forms are but as shadows” is the language o f apocalypse; it suggests that all earthly things shall pass aw ay before the end; it is potentially antinomian, since it may very well indicate that the types are exhausted; and yet it is still Aristotelian in a w ay that would have made it intelligible to the Thomist Savona­ rola. T h e context in which men attain their final end— or recover their prima forma, though this concept might not have been antinomian 28 From the letter to Fairfax, signed by eleven Agitators, accompanying The Case of the A rm y Truly Stated (Oxford, 1647); see Woodhouse, p. 437m 373

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enough for the radical saints of the N e w Model29—is that of apoca­ lypse; the “ end” of Aristotelian teleology is still united with the eschatological “ end” of prophetic time. A pplying the mode of analysis adopted in the preceding section of this chapter, one might argue that the radical saint was reacting to the same situation as Hunton and Parker. Bereft of all traditional structures of legitimation, Hunton had appealed to conscience and to heaven; Parker had moved in the direction of a pre-Hobbesian naturalism; and it would have been theoretically possible for a Machiavellian to appeal to the confrontation of virtu with jortuna. Our model suggests, how ­ ever, that alongside the moments of fortune, of nature and of provi­ dential judgment, we may detect— almost as an extension of the lastnamed— the moment of apocalyptic grace; army radicalism, then, would be responding to a moment of acute particularity b y adopting one of a limited range of languages b y which such a moment might be met. But it is fairly clear that such an explanation would not be ade­ quate. Apocalyptic conviction in the men of the army had helped (like the virtu of Machiavelli’s new prince) to create the situation which intensified the need for it, and was operating as an independent variable. It presents us with a case, not simply of minds seeking to regularize a delegitimized and chaotic situation, but of a new level of civic con­ sciousness finding means of becoming articulate. T he sense of a call­ ing peculiar to the Puritan saint had operated to give these soldiers a sense of the irreducible personality— the “ talent” or “ nature” — inher­ ent in each one of them. This could be expressed in terms of each man’s unique relation, accountability, or duty to God, and also in terms of the radical equality of rights and powers which had been given to each to enable him to perform that duty. So far the W alzerian analysis holds good; and it continues to hold when we add that the calling, as an act of grace, must be thought of as operating upon the individual in time, and that time conceived in such terms must be conceived prophetically or apocalyptically. But if we add, along the lines sug­ gested in the previous chapter, that the English saint was— at the oppo­ site extreme from being alienated from his inherited laws and liber­ ties— involved in them to the point where his calling did not liberate him from them, but liberated him to transform them, a great many points in the analysis will become clear. W e can now understand w h y he felt himself called to restore those liberties to their original form, while insisting that what that original form had contained was the freedom of a people to be both naturally and apocalyptically them29 A thorough antinomian might hold that the state of redeemed man would be higher than that of the unfallen Adam, not a mere recovery of it; see the article by Rosenmeier cited above, ch. i, n. 5.

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selves. W e can see how the individual’s conviction of a radically free natural capacity within himself intensified his ability to engage in radi­ cal action based upon radical criticism of his laws and liberties in their inherited form ; the Agreement of the People was the antinomianism of the Ancient Constitution. Lastly, we can see that, while we are not yet at a Machiavellian moment in English thought, w e are at something comparable to the Savonarolan moment, at which civic consciousness, apocalyptic conviction, and inherited second nature were in a complex relationship. T h e prophets, furthermore, were armed; they had only to continue to believe in themselves. Th e radicals of 1647 m ay therefore be thought of as standing at a moment— whether one at which a true millennium seemed imminent or, more spiritually, one at which some liberation amounting almost to divinization of human capacities seemed to be taking place— of freedom triumphing over necessity. W here the casuists of allegiance had come in some cases to a timeless moment from which authority could and must be reconstituted, the illuminists of liberty had come to an apoca­ lyptic moment, at which their swords and spirits appeared at the point of remodeling the laws and reinstituting freedom. But at Putney30 there came to a head their debate with their own commanders, who desired to tell them that they still stood within a structure of continuing neces­ sity from which they were not altogether free to move, and that to be so located was inseparable from the condition even of the saint (as it had necessitated Machiavelli’s prophet to bear arms). Ireton, backed b y Cromwell, insisted that there must be engagements which no inner conviction entitled men to break, and that there must be structures of positive law, against which the ulaw of nature” was not a sufficient plea. His chief reason for saying this, he declared, was that the law of nature might decree that each man should have his own, but could not determine what was to be each man’s.31 Property, an affair of par­ ticulars— Harrington was to call it “ the goods of fortune” — must be distributed b y human decisions, not b y universal principles. Th e L aw of G od doth not give me property, nor the L aw of Nature, but property is of human constitution. I have a property and this I shall enjoy. Constitution founds property.32 T h e individual— Ireton was declaring— must be defined b y human society if the latter was to exist; law and property must give him his social rights and personality if law and property were to have any security at all— and without them, what would he be? Y et the social institutions which made men what they were must themselves be of 30 The full text of these debates is to be found in Woodhouse. 31 Woodhouse, pp. 54, 58, 60, 63. 32 Woodhouse, p. 69. 37 5

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human creation; and consequently the individual must be born into, and obliged to, a structure of human law which was not of his mak­ ing. Since this was England, property and custom supplied the answer to the problem of how this might be achieved. The fabric of common law, within which each man lived and moved and had his being, was a structure defining modes of holding, inheriting, and transmitting land in terms of immemorial custom; and the only individual Ireton would admit to civic participation was one who had inherited— or had acquired the means o f bequeathing— a minimum of land in freehold ten­ ure. If it be true, as is contended,33 that the Levellers meant to exclude from the franchise those who were so far propertyless as to live as servants in other men’s houses, that does not bridge the gap between Ireton and Rainborough. For Ireton the land must be freehold, or at least assimilable to the legal concept of freehold tenure;34 it must be capable of being conceived of as an inheritance at common law, which was itself an inheritance of customs from time immemorial, since there was no other w ay of anchoring the individual, from birth and at the moments of m ajority and inheritance, within a structure of law and property he could be obliged and committed to defend.35 Sir Robert Filmer, inconspicuous in Kent, was w orking out a w ay of achieving the same denial of natural liberty by means of a theory of patriarchalism;36 but Ireton’s argument was by far the more widely intelligible. It should be stressed that the necessity being imposed upon the indi­ vidual is in an important sense more formal than specific: an obliga­ tion to respect some system of law and property, rather than the spe­ cific system now obtaining. Ireton was capable of conceiving and designing far-reaching and extremely intelligent plans of reform ,37 and the social structures which defined men were, as we have seen, them­ selves to be man-made. But his insistence on an inheritable freehold, a “ permanent interest,” qualifying the individual for citizenship by com­ mitting him to an inherited structure of obligations, is strong evidence that in the last analysis he desired to anchor the individual in custom, in a law made b y men indeed, but by men who could not be identified. His arguments at Putney suggest the ideological explanation of w hy, a year and a half later, he rejected one of the few opportunities for revo­ lutionary action ever afforded an English statesman. T o purge parlia33 E.g., by C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 107-59. 34 Woodhouse, pp. 57-58. 35 Woodhouse, pp. 66-67. 36 See Laslett’s introduction to his edition; above, n. 10. 37 E.g., the Heads of the Proposals; Kenyon, pp. 302-308, but the full text in John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State (London, 1659-1701), viii, 731-36. 37 6

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ment, instead of dissolving it and calling for elections on a new fran­ chise, was to admit that the army— as led into political action by the senior officers— would always demand legitimation b y elements of the traditional constitution, and was purging the House of Commons with no other end than to get a House of Commons which would legitimate its actions.38 Such an attitude issued logically enough from Ireton’s mode of arguing that social structures, laws, and institutions were pre­ requisite to the political wills of men. Because the revolution of 1648-1649 had this unfulfilled character, its apologetics took the form of a justification of departure from existing w ays— something for which revolutions seldom find it necessary to apologize. A main theme, for instance, o f the declaration which the Rum p Parliament published follow ing the K in g’s execution, was that the monarchy had failed— not just in the recent crisis, but throughout its history— to provide England with political stability;39 and since it was necessary in addition to justify the abolition of the House of Lords, this could easily become an argument that the mixed constitution of the Afis'iver to the N ineteen Propositions had failed in the purpose for which balanced governments were designed and must be replaced by a better one. A vehemence of feeling against a hereditary or entrenched aristocracy, moreover, remained part of the content of arm y radicalism and outlived the Leveller decline. But the defensive tone o f the Rum p’s declaration points toward that of the main theoretical debate of 1649 and the years following: the so-called Engagement controversy,40 w hich reveals to us the diversity of directions in which Independent thought must go, once deprived of radical conviction. For the En ­ gagement was little more than an undertaking to be obedient to the government as at present constituted, and the complex and important controversy that ensued was concerned with the problem of granting obedience to a government de facto but not de jure— one possessed of effective power rather than legitimate authority. In short, the casuist search for authority was now resumed, and it is testimony to the endur­ ing strength of English conservatism under catastrophic conditions that so colorless a theme produced so much thought of major importance. 38 Kenyon, p. 294; David Underdown, Pride's Purge (Oxford University Press, 1971).

39 A Declaratio?i of the Parliament of England, Expressing the Grounds of their Late Proceedings, and of Setting the Prese?it Government in the way of a Free State (London, 22 March 1648/9), pp. 6, 14, 17; for the Lords, p. 20. See also The True Portraiture of the Ki?igs of England . . . (London, 1650). 40For this see Wallace (above, n. 15) and Skinner (above, n. 23), and Wallace, “ The Engagement Controversy, 1649-52: an annotated list of pamphlets,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 68 (1964), 384-405. 377

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A n analysis of the tangled strategy of this debate will carry us in the direction of Hobbes, but it will also furnish us with some of the condi­ tions for a revival o f Machiavellian and republican solutions. Both in theory and in the actual conditions of 1649, rule de facto was rule b y the sword. T o all participants in this debate, the problem to be confronted was that of establishing the exact conditions under which government b y human law had broken down and given place to government by human power, and in so doing to determine the modes in which power might be seen as supplying its own justification. T h e simplest and most obvious strategy was the appeal direct to provi­ dence: G o d ’s inscrutable will had brought these things to pass, and it was not for his creatures to resist his instruments. But not only was this argument vulnerable to a number of counterattacks; to the highly and diversely articulate minds of the time there were too many tempting directions in which it might be further developed. It was, for instance, no more than a single step from the providential to the prophetic; Cromwell, who repeatedly averred that he could not have put his hand to the w ork if he had not felt himself called to it, was surrounded by men anxious to interpret his and their roles in the context of prophe­ cies about to be fulfilled and an apocalypse or millennium about to occur. But it is noteworthy— and typical of that divided mind in the saints which was discussed earlier— that, as his power mounted after 1653, Cromwell declined to see himself as any specific actor in the eschatological scenario and repeatedly insisted that his power was but that of a constable; thus marking, in Lam ont’s opinion, the definitive transition from godly (in the Foxean sense) to “ godless rule.” 41 The Protector himself was willing to acknowledge by implication that his authority was de facto rather than de jure prophetico; the rhetoric of Davidic kingship, with its shadowings of types to be renewed, might cling to him nevertheless;42 but his attitude does much to explain w h y the doctrine that the saints, expecting Christ, now ruled in England remained the asseveration of a minority. D e facto argument, strictly speaking, could never adopt the full apocalyptic perspective and remain itself. Apocalyptic had grow n anti­ nomian in its willingness to proclaim that all human authority was, or soon might be, overturned and a true regnum Christi at hand; and it was only on the assumption that this was not the case, that the down­ fall of the old and the erection of the new government had occurred 4 1Lamont, Godly Rule, ch. 6, pp. 136-62. 42 J. A. Mazzeo, “Cromwell as Davidic King,” in Renaissance and SeventeenthCentury Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), pp. 183-208, and Wallace, Destiny His Choice, ch. 3, pp. 106-44. The discussion turns on the inter­ pretation of Marvell’s Cromwellian poems.

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within continuing human time, that the problem of the Engagement was worth debating at all. The appeal to providence was the first move in a strategy for dealing with time; but if the event were not apoca­ lyptic, it would not be unique and would form one of a class of revolu­ tions occurring from time to time— Ascham’s Confusions and R evolu ­ tions o f G overnm ent is a key title, as well as an important text, of this controversy.43 If governments fell from time to time, how was author­ ity restored; or, in different yet familiar language, what was the nature of the individual’s obligation in this predicament? In a brilliant and patient exploration of the richly textured thought of A ndrew Marvell, John M. W allace has demonstrated that the providential perspective was far from being exhausted at this point; it was possible to develop, with the wealth and com plexity of poetic genius, a sense of the individ­ ual’s implication in events to whose very ambiguity he owed a certain pietas; but, in accepting this interpretation of Marvell, it remains impor­ tant to notice what languages spin off, as it were, at low er levels of his thought and other men’s, to express the idea of a radical fracture of legitimacy. If such fractures occurred with any regularity in human affairs, it would follow that every government might be traced to a time when it had been founded not in right but in the sword; and the assertion that all are indeed radically unjust at the outset is found expressed— b y Anthony Ascham and Marchamont Nedham among others— in terms which seem at last unmistakably Machiavellian. “ This is that circle w e so painfully move in,” wrote Ascham,44 alluding plainly enough to the Polybian anakuklosis, though he did not go on to pro­ pose either a legislator or a republic as the w ay out of the pain of w hich his writings are full; a combination of providence and nature continued to dominate his thinking. Similarly, Marvell— though W al­ lace’s analysis indicates that this is only one dimension of his vision— introduces into his Horatian Ode a number of no less unmistakable images of Cromwell as a Machiavellian prince-legislator akin to Rom u­ lus in the necessary illegality and ruthlessness of his proceedings, and into his Ode on the First Anniversary o f the G overnm ent under . . . C rom w ell a portrait of Oliver as both a Davidic restorer of prophetic authority and a classical legislator capable of bridging the instabilities of time in a single creative act.45 David, it is worth recalling, is not 43 For Ascham, see Wallace, Destiny His Choice, pp. 30-38, 45-48, 54-58. 44 Confusions and Revolutions (2d ed., 1649), pp. 73-74 . Cf. Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth of England Stated (1650), ed. Knachel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1969). 45 Mazzeo, “ Cromwell as Machiavellian Prince in Marvell’s Horatian Ode” and “ Cromwell as Davidic King,” op.cit.\ Wallace, Destiny His Choice, chs. 2-3; Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli, pp. 144-46; Pocock, “The Onely Politi­ cian” (above, ch. x, n. 1), pp. 284-85. 379

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unlike Romulus in the ambiguities of his relationships with Saul before his anointing and with the sons of Zeruiah after it; there were points at which the Machiavellian and the prophetic perspectives lay not far apart. But the moment of the sword, while it could be occupied b y prince, legislator or prophet— all types appearing in Machiavelli’s gallery— could also be occupied b y figures normative in quite another w ay; we have already seen something of this while treating of H enry Parker. In jus gentium it was possible for a conqueror to intervene at this moment, bearing his sword as proof of the judgment of heaven in his favor, so that it was forbidden to oppose him however violent and extralegal his behavior. The type of this conqueror was not W illiam the Norm an so much as Nim rod of the Bible, the primeval despot whose pow er was not unwilled b y G o d ;46 but to Nedham and other writers the jus conquestus could be seen as in the possession of the arm y col­ lectively, those Englishmen in arms whose conquest proved both their natural and their providential right to rule in circumstances such as these. From this point a single step would of course equate the con­ querors with the saints; but another, in a different direction, would lead to salus populi, reason of state and the state of nature, in the w ay which w e have already studied and which Skinner, in a series of essays, has shown to be the crucial breakaway from the providential strategy of the de facto controversy at its outset47— crucial because it supplies the context in which Hobbes completed, published and at one level of per­ ception must have intended Leviathan (16 5 1) . This w ork was the most radical portrayal, among all those which appeared during the revolu­ tionary years in England, of the human individual existing at a moment o f near-total delegitimation and artificially recreating authority from a state of dereliction; it differed altogether in structure from the Machiavellian vision and may seem to have reduced the latter’s role in English thinking to one of secondary importance. It can be seen, however, that de facto argument heightened the importance of some elements of Machiavellism; the prince, the legis­ lator, and the cycle can be observed emanating, so to speak, from the moment of the sword; but the republic was not to reassert itself— as in theory it might have done— simply as a de facto device of stabiliza­ tion. It is one of the more interesting discoveries in all this long story that the classical republic made its appearance in English thought as an activist ideal, at a point where the de facto “ moment of the sw ord” 46 For these different types of conqueror, see Wallace, Destiny His Choice, pp. 22-28, 98-102, 132-34. 47 Above, n. 23.

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came into contact with the radicalism of the army, whose half-realized revolution had precipitated the conceptual and political problem in this form. A speaker at Putney opposed to the Levellers— Colonel Nathaniel Rich, afterwards a somewhat conservative fifth-monarchist and yet a foe to the Protectorate— had attacked the proposal to give votes to the poor, not only on the ordinary grounds that they would use their power to abolish all property, but also with the rather more realistic argument that to do this would be to give undue weight to a few great men on whom the poor would assuredly be dependent. This had happened at the end of the Roman republic, he indicated, and it would be no use pulling down the king to set up an emperor in his place.48 The importance of R ich ’s speech is that it reveals the presence, in the mind of at least one officer, of that classically derived association between republican liberty and a popular arm y which we have found as a standard theme in Florentine thought, although his attitude toward the prospect is indeed more negative than positive. W e now know, however, that it was not beyond the resources of the arm y’s vocabu­ lary to justify their intervention in political affairs b y presenting them­ selves as “ no mere mercenary arm y,” but a body of free citizen-soldiers, a claim which, if made in sufficiently Machiavellian terms, would entail the transformation of England into a popular republic. Such was not the language of Sexby and Rainborough, but it is possible to find a time and place, after the suppression of the Levellers, when such an ideology was energetically disseminated b y a writer well placed to reach a wide audience. The writer in question was none other than Marchamont Nedham,49 the journalist who shuffled the dominant concepts of the Civil W ar and Rum p years with a brilliance if anything enhanced b y what seems to have been a signal lack of sincerity or consistency. He won release 48 Woodhouse, p. 64: “I remember there were many workings and revolutions, as we have heard, in the Roman Senate; and there was never a confusion that did appear (and that indeed was come to) till the state came to know this kind of distribution of election. That is how the people’s voices were bought and sold, and that by the poor; and thence it came that he that was the richest man, and [a man] of some considerable power among the soldiers, and one they resolved on, made himself a perpetual dictator. And if we strain too far to avoid mon­ archy in kings [let us take heed] that we do not call for emperors to deliver us from more than one tyrant.” 49 For this reassessment of Nedham’s activities, see Pocock, “James Harrington and the Good Old Cause: A Study of the Ideological Context of His Writings,” Journal of British Studies 10, no. 1 (1970), 36-39. Also, J. Frank, The Beginnings of the English Newspaper (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961) and Knachel (ed.), The Case of the Commonwealth, introduction.

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from prison for a Royalist phase in his activities by engaging to write, and in 1650 publishing, The Case o f the Commonwealth o f England Stated, an appeal for de facto obedience which contains certain Machia­ vellian elements but recommends submission to a conquering sword with arguments involving extensive reliance on the pr^-Leviathan works of Hobbes. The Rump regime rewarded him with editorship of a new government w eekly entitled M ercurius Politicus, which he retained for many years; and in the summer of 1650 he began furnish­ ing it with leading articles at first excerpted from The Case o f the Commonwealth and later, when this material was used up, with other editorials which did not then appear in book form. These carried him through to m id- 16 5 2 , and thus cover the period of the Dunbar and W orcester campaigns, when the radical zeal of the regiments— the suppression of the Levellers notwithstanding— seems still to have been at a high level. The note struck b y the articles is consistently radical and democratic. The claims of a Presbyterian ministry to jure divino authority is denounced as the w ork of Antichrist;50 the commons of Scotland are to be liberated from the power of their chieftains;51 and above all, the editorials add up to the first sustained English exposition of republican dem ocracy in classical and Machiavellian terms. W hat can only be called a democratic government is to be based on the popu­ lar possession of arms52 and the rapid succession—Nedham calls it “ revolution,” as Harrington was to call it “ rotation” — of the repre­ sentatives and magistrates the people elect.53 There is repeatedly expressed a bitter mistrust of hereditary aristocracies and of senates which, not being regularly dissolved, come to almost the same thing.54 Th e politics of the Roman republic are presented from a point of view militantly plebeian; Athens— a rare thing at this period— is preferred over Sparta;55 and Venice, usually the paragon of mixed governments, becomes the archetype of “ standing aristocracies.” 56 A n y mode of power in a republic which is not contained within a balance and within 50Mercurius Politicus 99 (22-29 April 1652), 1553-56; 114 (5-12 Aug. 1652), 1785-89. 51 Ibid., 65 (28 Aug.-4 Sept. 1651), 1033-34; 73 (23-30 Oct- l65 i), 116152 Ibid., 103 (20-27 M ay ^ 52 ), 1609-13. 53 Ibid., 74 (30 Oct.-6 N ov. 1 6 5 1 ) , 11 7 3 - 7 5 ; 78 (27 N0V.-4 Dec. 1 6 5 1 ) , 12 37; 79 ( 4 -1 1 Dec. 1 6 5 1 ) , 1255-56; 91 (26 Feb.~4 March 16 52 ), 1442 (“revolution” ). 54 Ibid., 70 (2-9 Oct. 1651), 1100 -1101; 72 (16-23 Oct. 1651), 1142-43; 73 (23-30 Oct. 1651), 1158; 84 (8-15 Jan. 1652), 1334, 86 (22-29 J an- i 652), 1365-68; 89 (12-19 Feb. 1652), 1409-13. 55 Ibid., 71 (9-16 Oct. 1651), 1126; 73 (23-30 Oct. 1651), 1158; 84 (8-15 Jan. 1652), 1335; 88 (5-12 Feb. 1652), 1394; 91 (26 Feb.~4 March 1652), 1445. 56Ibid., 70 (2-9 Oct. 1651), 1100; 73 (23-30 Oct. 1651), 1158; 84 (8-15 Jan. 1652), 1338. 382

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a rapid rotation of office is, we are told, “ monarchical,” whether exer­ cised b y one man or a number.57 Nedham, writing after the Levellers and deriding them, had hit upon a new mode o f expressing democratic ideas in English; one with a long and complex history before it. For our purposes, what matters is that he was describing a vivere civile e popolare, based on the classical ideal of the armed citizen and the Machiavellian ideal of the armed and mili­ tant people. He was doing this because the appropriate paradigms were available in this form for articulating the claims which the army was still capable of making for itself as a revolutionary movement. W ith the other side o f his none too admirable journalistic personality, he was articulating— still in a fairly democratic form — the doctrine of de facto authority made necessary b y the arm y’s inability to press its revolution­ ary claims to the full. In those editorials drawn from The-Case o f the Com m onwealth, arm y and people appear as exercising the jus conquestus to be found in jus gentium ;58 but the trend of Nedham’s de facto arguments would carry him to advocating submission to any power exercising effective authority. W hen that power was the Cromwellian Protectorate, and elements of the arm y for which he had written in M ercurius Politicus were in opposition, Nedham was to find himself in an awkward position and the history of English Machiavellism was to make a fresh start. [m] From what we know of the circumstances in which James Harring­ ton’s Oceana was published during the late summer or fall o f 1656, the immediate background seems to have been the increasing discontent of some arm y circles with the w ay in which the Protectorate had been developing since 1654.59 There are shadowy links associating Harring­ 57 Ibid., 72 (16-23 Oct- ^ 5 1 ) , 1143; 87 (29 Jan.-5 Feb. 1652), 1385; 92 (4-11 March 1652), 1457-62; 100 (29 April-6 May 1652), 1569-73. The last especially. 58 Ibid., 17 (26 Sept.-3 Oct. 1650), 277-78; 18 (3-10 Oct. 1650), 293-96; 19 (10-17 Oct. 1650), 309-12; 20 (17-24 Oct. 1650), 325-26; 21 (24-31 Oct. 1650), 341-43; 22 (31 Oct.-7 N ov. 1650), 357-59; 23 (7-14 N ov. 1650), 373-74; 24 (14-21 N ov. 1650), 389-90 (the kings of England); 25 (21-28 N ov. 1650), 407-408; 26 (28 N o v.-5 Dec. 1650), 423-25 (Nimrod and the kings of Israel); 27 (5-12 Dec. 1650), 439-40; 28-30 (12 Dec.-2 Jan. 1651), at large, for the necessity of obedience to the sword; 31 (2-9 Jan. 1651), 503-504, for the body politic originating in subjection; 35 (30 Jan.6 Feb. 1651), 567-68, for the danger of a conquering people’s losing their liberty; 75 (6-13 N ov. 1651), 1189-91; 93 (11-18 March 1652), 1457-60; 98 (15-22 April 1652), 1540. 59 For further detail, see Pocock, “James Harrington and the Good Old Cause,” loc. cit.

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ton with former officers and others who disliked the assumption of power by a military leadership, unrepresentative of regimental feeling, which showed no sign of establishing the frequently elected parlia­ ments called for since 1647 and had placed the army under the control o f the Protector as chief of the executive power. Rumors may well have been circulating during 1656 concerning the intentions of some Protectoral grandees which took shape, in the spring of 1657, as the H um ble Petition and A d v ic e , 6 0 the crucially antirevolutionary step of the Cromwellian decline, with its proposals to convert the office of Protector into a hereditary monarchy and establish a nominated “ Other House,” to maintain a balance between the “ single person” and uni­ cameral “ parliament” of which the constitution was otherwise held to consist. This was plainly a return to the form of government described in the A nsw er to the N ineteen Propositions fourteen or fifteen years previously, and indeed the words “ the three estates” are to be found in the Petition and A d v ic e *1 A bitter opposition, both to the erection of an entrenched aristocracy and to any return to the historic constitu­ tion, now became a motif of that surviving republicanism which pro­ mulgated the slogan of “ the good old cause,” and it may be suspected that an anticipation of what the Petition and A d vice would contain accounts for the opposition literature of the preceding summer. A t all events, it can have been no accident, and must have been a miscalcula­ tion, when Nedham, in June 1656, published his M ercurius Politicus editorials of 1650-1652 in book form as The Excellency of a Free State, with little abatement of their fu ry against monarchical and aristocratical intrusions— there is evidence that he subsequently regretted this step and the association with Oceana it had brought him62— or when Sir H enry Vane, about the same time, brought out his H ealing Question, the only one of these works to be prosecuted by the authorities, in which the arm y appears as the justly conquering “ people of G od ,” now unhappily divided against itself, and proposals are made for restor­ ing it to its proper function of exercising the rule of the saints in England.63 But Oceana is one of those works that transcend their immediate context. T h e book’s historical significance is that it marks a moment of paradigmatic breakthrough, a major revision of English political theory and history in the light of concepts drawn from civic humanism and Machiavellian republicanism. T he immediate reason for undertak60 Text in Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, pp. 350-57. 61 Kenyon, p. 353 (clause 7). 62 Pocock, “James Harrington and the Good Old Cause,” pp. 38-39. 63 Margaret Judson, The Political Thought of Sir Henry Vane the Younger (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969).

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ing such a revision was the impulse to justify the military republic in England as the rule of a popolo armato. The lengthy survey we have been conducting o f the modes of articulating political consciousness available to Englishmen is enough to show us, however, that the lan­ guage of vivere civile had a hard struggle to establish itself in the teeth of competing alternatives; and we will not expect to find Harrington, in the role of an English Machiavelli, staging a dramatic conflict between virtue and fortune, or playing the part of an accuser of the brethren, thrusting a sword into the side of English moral conscious­ ness and making it cry out against the wound. That distinction was reserved for Hobbes. Harrington’s purposes seem to have been,64 first, to argue against any return to the traditional “ ancient” or “ balanced” constitution b y showing that it had rested on foundations which had always been insecure and were now swept aw ay; second, as the occu­ pant of what we m ay term a post-Savonarolan moment, to show that this transcendence of ancient use and custom was rather a secular than an apocalyptic process (w e should not forget that it was possible to be both), which did not, however, necessitate a rule of the saints. For the first purpose, he constructed a civil history of the sw ord,65 based on a Machiavellian theory which depicted the possession of arms as crucial to both the distribution of power and the exercise of civic vir­ tue; for the second, he developed a theory of citizenship which, in con­ junction with the first group of arguments, showed the Englishman as citizen and the English republic as standing nearer to G od than any oligarchy of self-selected saints. In the former respect, he threw a bridge of theory over the gap between Ireton’s conviction of the neces­ sity o f property and Rainborough’s assurance of the opportunity of freedom, and found means of depicting the English freeholder as the classical citizen returned to earth from Parnassus;66 in the latter, he stood back-to-back with Hobbes at a strange and significant moment in the evolution of the Puritan millennial consciousness. In his long­ term historical significance, however, he appears in a somewhat differ­ ent light, and this will be explained in further chapters. Harrington’s w ork has been described as “ a Machiavellian meditation on feudalism.” 67 Am ong the pre-1642 generation of English scholars, 64 The author is preparing an edition of Harrington’s political writings, for the Cambridge University Press, to which the reader is referred. See also The Ancient Constitution, ch. vi, 124-47. 65 Oceana, “Second Part of the Preliminaries.” References are to Toland (ed.), The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington (17 7 1); see pp. 57-72. 66Traiano Boccalini’s Ragguagli da Parnasso (Venice, 1612-13) was one of Harrington’s favorite sources. 67 Pocock, Ancient Constitution, p. 147.

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there has been traced a grow ing understanding of the nature of baron­ age, knight’s service, and dependent military tenures in general, which were seen as periodizing English history, having entered the realm with either the Saxons or the Normans and having faded from dominance over law and society at a subsequent date hard to fix with precision. Historical perception of the knight and vassal of true feudalism tended to merge with the memory— which we have already found expressed in a Machiavellian context b y Bacon and Ralegh— of the military power which more recent magnates had based upon their retainers; and this telescoping of images permitted Harrington to think of a dis­ tribution of power based on the jeudum as entering England with the Saxons and leaving it only as the result of legislation devised by H enry V II.68 It was not new to suggest that the decline of military power in the hands of the nobility had led to important changes in political power, or that it had left the king face to face with his commons. H ar­ rington’s crucial innovation— which makes him the true pioneer of civic humanist thought in England— was to erect these perceptions into a general history of political power in both Europe and England, founded on the Machiavellian theory of the possession of arms as nec­ essary to political personality. The Florentines had stressed that if a man bore arms not for himself but for another, he was incapable of citizenship, since the use of arms— the crucial act in asserting both power and virtue— must be at his command if he was to be at the republic’s; and they had perceived the transition from Roman republic to empire in terms of the rise and fall of armed individuality. Harring­ ton’s acquaintance with English legal antiquarianism permitted him at this point to add a further dimension— one which, as he put it, Machia­ velli had very narrow ly missed:69 the bearing of arms, once it was seen as a function of feudal tenure, proved to be based upon the possession of property. The crucial distinction was that between vassalage and freehold; it determined whether a man’s sword was his lord’s or his own and the commonwealth’s; and the function of free proprietorship became the liberation of arms, and consequently of the personality, for free public action and civic virtue. The politicization o f the human person had now attained full expression in the language of English political thought; G o d ’s Englishman was now zdon politikon in virtue of his sword and his freehold. If the basis of political personality was now to be property, in the real or (less probably) in the movable sense, it was anchored in some­ thing more concretely material than the Aristotelian oikos, and H ar­ rington showed himself inclined to discount Machiavelli’s emphasis on 68Toland, pp. 60-65.

6&Toland, p. 39.

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a strictly moral corruption, an actual disintegration of the civic per­ sonality, as a main cause of the decay of governments. W hen a govern­ ment became “ corrupt,” he thought, it was less because the citizens had ceased to display the virtues appropriate to it than because the distribu­ tion of political authority was no longer properly related to the dis­ tribution of property that should determine it.70 W hen this happened, it would be found that equals were attempting to behave as lords and vassals, or lords and vassals to behave as equals; and in each case political power, exercised in w ays no longer justified by the distri­ bution of objective freedom, must be either forcibly and despotically imposed or (what came to the same thing) weak and failing, des­ tined to be replaced by a distribution of authority geared to the ac­ tually existing distribution of land. T h e classical sixfold typology of constitutions— m onarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, each exercised either justly, with an eye to the common good, or unjustly, with an eye to the good of the ruling part only— could now be modified and become a scheme in which each either was or was not related to the actual distribution of land. Harrington, however, introduced a further distinction between monarchy of the Turkish type, in which one man owned all the land and others held it from him at pleasure, and mon­ archy of the “ G othic” or feudal type, in which a few held of the king and the many held of the few. This last, he suggested, was not a true monarchy so much as an ill-designed and unstable balance. Feudal rebellions in the Gothic case, and rebellions o f the palace guard— janis­ saries or praetorians— in the Turkish type (to which the later Roman empire had belonged), ensured that monarchy, even in its pure form, never became a truly stable mode of government.71 Harrington described property as “ the goods of fortune,” 72 and had no particular conception of social laws regulating its distribution. But he did think that it could be redistributed, or that its redistribution might be prevented, b y human legislation;73 and the English conceptual context ensured that he was not so far committed to the notion of jortuna that he need present each mode of government as necessarily degenerating into its dysfunctional form, or his sixfold classification as moving inescapably in a Polybian anakuklosis. H e did, however, hold that only a dem ocracy of landholders— that is, only a society where a demos, or many, o f landed freemen held land in relative equality— pos70 Toland, p. 68. 71 Toland, pp. 37, 50, 65-67, 129-30, 248-52. 72 Toland, pp. 36-37. 73 This point is dwelt upon—I think a little too emphatically—by J. R. Pole in

Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (London: Macmillan, 1966).

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sessed the human resources (Machiavelli might have said the materia) necessary to distribute political authority in the diversified and bal­ anced w ays that created a self-stabilizing politeia; and such a common­ wealth, he contended, might prove theoretically immortal.74 He also presented a history of political authority in the W estern world which did indeed follow a cyclical pattern: Moses and Lycurgus, Solon and Romulus, appeared as agrarian legislators who had established common­ wealths of freeholding warriors, but their w ork had been undone b y Roman conquest and the growth of latifundia; after the Gracchi failed to prevent this, the Caesars and their client armies had established an unstable m onarchy in which land and military powers were shared between the emperor and the senate; the Goths, called in as mercenaries in the oscillations of this system, had taken over the entire empire and established feudal imbalances of monarchy and aristocracy. T he “ Gothic balance,” or “ modern prudence,” Harrington said, though tra­ ditionally praised as a political masterpiece— an allusion to the kind of thinking represented b y the A nsw er to the Nineteen Propositions— had nowhere been anything more than a “ wrestling match” between king and nobility, an instability rendered persistent by the circum­ stance that each party could neither adjust to the other’s power nor become independent of it.75 In “ Oceana” — his lightly idealized E ng­ land— “ modern prudence” had lasted from the Anglo-Saxon invasions to the advent of the Tudors. H enry V II, however— the portrait owes much to Bacon— had played a role very like that which Giannotti had assigned to the Medici; he had emancipated the military tenants (whom Harrington confounds with retainers) from the authority of their lords and, in rendering the latter impotent to harm him in future, had begun the elevation of the former into a landowning people (Giannotti’s m ediocri) over whom monarchy had no hold.76 It had been reserved for Charles I to discover his own obsolescence; challenged b y the power of the commons, he had found the nobility without authority to uphold his and had been forced to attempt rule b y an arm y; but, there being no reservoir of soldiers other than landholding freemen in no w ay committed to fight for him, he had failed and his monarchy 74Toland, pp. 178-80. See Z. S. Fink, The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth-Century England (Evans­ ton: Northwestern University, 19 4 5), and Charles Blitzer, An Immortal Common­ wealth: The Political Thought of James Harrington (New Haven: Yale Univer­ sity Press, i960). 75 Toland, pp. 63, 129. 76Toland, pp. 64-65, 364-66. For references to Bacon (both the History of Henry V ll and the Essays), see pp. 32, 64. For Giannotti, see above, ch. ix, n. 5.

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had fallen.77 T he armed “ people” of proprietors now held the field and might repeat the w ork of Moses and Lycurgus. A cycle was completed, and there was an opportunity for the construction of an immortal commonwealth. Harrington had outdistanced Ireton; he had anchored politics in a history of property, but one consisting of a cyclical series of transformations rather than a mere tradition o f inheritance. In addition, he had completed his theoretical demolition of the claims of the ancient constitution to be regarded either as a structure of use and custom adapted to the genius of the people, or as an exemplary balance of the one, the few , and the many. If he had not shown, like the Levellers, that it was rooted in Norm an usurpation, he had depicted it as a phase in a cycle of unstable forms, a system which never had or could have brought peace or order to England. T o the extent to which his thought can be seen as grow ing out of the casuist and de facto controversies of preceding years, he was prepared to argue that the incoherence of the old regime had left the choice between |ring and parliament to the conscience of the individual, and that no man could be justly punished for exercising such a choice;78 and to readers who might fear, in the tradition of Ascham or Nedham, that all government was rooted in the sword, he had offered a civil theory and a civil history of the sword which led to conclusions far more sanguine and positive than those of Leviathan. His popolo armato is not the collective Nim rod exercising jus conquestus that had been imagined b y Nedham, nor is it the m ystically selected band of saints envisaged b y Vane; the sword here is neither Leviathan’s nor Gideon’s, but the foundation on which a republican people erects the structure of its civic virtue. The political individual depicted in Harrington’s scheme is still the exponent of civic virtue presupposed— however skeptically—in all Florentine schemes of civic humanism, but we have already seen that Harrington emphasizes less the moral than the material bases of his personality. There is less in Oceana about the moral degradation 77Toland, p. 65: “ . . . for the house of peers, which alone had stood in this gap, now sinking down between the king and the commons, shew’d that Crassus was dead, and the isthmus broken. But a monarchy devested of its nobility, has no refuge under heaven but an army. Wherfore the dissolution of this government caus’d the war, not the war the dissolution of this government. “ Of the king’s success with his arms it is not necessary to give any further account, than that they prov’d as ineffectual as his nobility, but without a nobility or an army (as has bin shew’d) there can be no monarchy. W herfore what is there in nature that can arise out of these ashes, but a popular government, or a new monarchy to be erected by the victorious army?” 78 Toland, p. 69.

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involved in corruption than there had been in the sixteenth century or was to be again in the eighteenth; and the worst thing Harrington’s “ people” ever has to fear is loss of government,79 by which he means less a coercive sovereign than the “ orders” or ordini which guide men into the opportunities of virtue. As in Machiavelli, the bearing of arms is the essential medium through which the individual asserts both his social power and his participation in politics as a responsible moral being; but the possession of land in nondependent tenure is now the material basis for the bearing of arms. That tenure might entail modes o f social dependence other than vassalage Harrington does not seem to have considered; his stress on the importance of arms m ay have led him to lump together all tenures which did not impose the duty of military service; but if, like Ireton and Rainborough at Putney, he did not explore the vast area intermediate between true freehold and servi­ tude, he combined elements from both their arguments in his. Like Ire­ ton, he insisted on a transmissible and hereditary property in land as the prerequisite of any interest or participation in the commonwealth. Servants, he declared, were no part of the latter and any danger they presented came from without,80 as did the danger from foreign ene­ mies. But like Rainborough, he seems to have regarded the economic autonomy of citizenship as including men who worked for wages, so long as they inhabited cottages of their own and were not servants liv­ ing in other men’s houses and families.81 Harrington’s attitude to the economy has been much debated, and an attempt has been made to show that he thought of land as basically a market commodity, to be bought and sold at a profit, which would make his citizenry a fluctuat­ ing and mobile class of entrepreneurs.82 But a good argument can be adduced to suggest that his economics were Greek and based on the relations of oikos to polis. W hen land was acquired, it was in order to bequeath it :83 to found families or oikoi based on a security of inherit­ ance, which set the sons free to bear arms and cast ballots in the muster of the commonwealth. As with Aristotle, the end of land is not profit, but leisure: the opportunity to act in the public realm or assembly, to display virtue. W e return toward an ethos of civic excellence, in which politics are peculiarly suited to “ the genius of a gentleman,” 84 79 Toland, p. 469 (A System of Politics, iv, 18, 19,22). 80 Toland, pp. 77, 138: “The causes of commotion in a commonwealth are either external or internal. External are from enemies, from subjects, or from servants.” 81 Toland, p. 247, where it is argued that such a man would have no interest in using his voting power to level property. 82 C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, ch. 6, especially pp. 82-88. 83 Toland, p. 480 (System of Politics, x, 4-5). 84 Toland, p. 53. 390

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but the poor freeholders are not dismissed from the role of the criti­ cally applauding Many. Harrington knew that property might exist in real or in mobile forms, and specifically declared that his general laws concerning the relations of property to power would operate as well in the latter case as in the form er.85 But, though he was acquainted with Holland and is said to have served in an English regiment there, he nowhere draws the lineaments of a society whose military and political structure are based upon property in goods and money; the Dutch, rather far from being a classical people in arms, would have given him difficulty if he had. Holland and Genoa— not Venice, be it noted— appear as his types of the w holly mercantile society only in the context of a discussion as to whether “ the balance in trade eats out the balance in land.” This proves to be an examination of the impact of usury upon landed prop­ erty. Holland and Genoa, profit-making societies, clearly have no need of regulations against usury; ancient Israel and Sparta, basing their constitutions upon the distribution of land where the agrarian territory was of limited extent, had to limit the operations of usury rigorously in order to prevent the distribution of real property becoming entangled in a web of debt.86 For the same reason, the modern Jew s should be reestablished in a territory where they could revert to the condition of agriculturists.87 Oceana, however, is of sufficient extent to permit its merchants the practice of lending upon interest (though not, appar­ ently, to readmit the Je w s); the landed system cannot be disturbed by usury and m ay therefore be stimulated and enriched b y it.88 The pleas­ ure of bourgeois-spotting scholars at finding Harrington engaged in justifying speculative profit in seventeenth-century England should not obscure the fact that he saw speculation in money as related to the inheritance of land more negatively than positively. T h e end of prop­ erty was stability and leisure: it anchored the individual in the structure of power and virtue, and liberated him to practice these as activities. The objection to market profit as the basis o f civic personality was its mobility; “ lightly come,” said Harrington, “ lightly go.” 89 W hat a man had he might lose; what he was, he might lose at the same instant. The superior man, observed Confucius, was not a utensil; and civic person­ ality was not a commodity. Should Oceana’s volume of trade expand, o f course, it might well be necessary for the republic to increase its territorial extent. This may have been one reason w h y Harrington echoes Machiavelli’s insist­ ence that an armed popular republic must be “ a commonwealth for 85Toland, pp. 38, 228. 87Toland, pp. 33-34 . 89 Toland, p. 227.

86Toland, pp. 228-29. 88Toland, p. 229; also 100-101.

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expansion’ ;90 but there are some important differences. Both men have in common the idea that a popular republic must place arms in the people’s hands, and that these will be for use rather than ornament or ritual. But Machiavelli— affected, like Bruni before him, b y thoughts of the Roman conquest of the free cities of Etruria— envisaged the republic in Polybian style as contiguous with other republics and king­ doms, and as necessarily involved in wars with its equals; and the destiny of Rome appeared to him cannibalistic, destructive of other peoples’ virtue and ultimately of her own. O f England, however, H ar­ rington wrote: “ the sea gives law to the growth of Venice, but the growth of Oceana gives law to the sea.” 91 Both were islands, insulated by water from the constant threat of enemies at their gates; but whereas Venice had room only for merchants, craftsmen, and mariners, and abstained from empire and democracy through lack of an inde­ pendent citizenry, England was both island and agrarian territory, capable of breeding an armed people who should be democrats at home and conquerors abroad. The lack of terra-firma. contacts, moreover, meant that there were no neighbor republics whose liberty and virtue might be subverted and that Oceana might expand without fear of self­ corruption; but Harrington is unclear as to just what this means in the real world. T rue to the mood in which Marvell had declared that Cromwell, as bearer of the public sword, “ to all states not free, shall climacteric be,” he imagines the English republic as hegemon, liberating adjacent Europe from the Gothic (and probably papal) yo k e;92 but there is an alternative vision, oceanic rather than continental, in which the conquering and land-hungry freemen are seen colonizing an Ireland depopulated of its ancient inhabitants, “ where every citizen w ill in time have his villa.” 93 (T he Puritan army in Ireland was a refuge for antiProtectoral opinions, and several of Harrington’s associates and admir­ ers were connected with it.) “ There be other plantations,” the passage observes, “ and the commonwealth will have more.” 94 In view o f the importance which his thought was later to enjoy in the Thirteen Colo­ nies, it is tempting to say that Harrington visualized the settlement of an empty Ireland carried across the Atlantic; but there is a reference to “ the colonies in the Indies,” 95 which may very well be the American settlements, as certain to become independent in no distant time. If it is obscure, however, just where the uncorrupting expansion of Oceana is to take place, it is certain that Harrington, like Giannotti before him, is determined to have the best of both alternatives posed 90 Toland, pp. 178-85. 92 Toland, pp. 185-88. 94 Toland, p. 100.

91 Toland, p. 93 Toland, p. 95 Toland, p.

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b y Machiavelli at the beginning of the Discorsi. Oceana was to be a Rom e in respect of unlimited expansion, a Venice in respect of per­ petual stability, liberty, and virtue. T o this end he made his legislator, in a speech of even more than usual length,96 rehearse the whole pas­ sage from Discorsi i, 6, in which the antithesis of Rom e and Venice had first been stated, and conclude that Machiavelli had been w rong in contending that the price paid for arming the people had been con­ stant strife between the nobility and plebeians (whose effects had been fatal to the republic when the wealth of empire was the prize con­ tended fo r). Like M achiavelli’s philo-Venetian critics, he argued that civil strife at Rome was the result, not of plebeian turbulency, but of the patricians’ hereditary monopoly of office, which was causally unre­ lated to the arming of the people. Venice had solved this problem by making her aristocracy a body elected b y and rotating among the many, and Machiavelli had been w rong in supposing that the disarma­ ment of the people was the cause of her internal peace.97 Oceana, rising out of the w reck of the Gothic balance and the disappearance of its hereditary baronage, had an insular situation and a landowning and arms-bearing people; she had only to adopt the rotatory aristocracy of the Most Serene Republic, and she could be Venice and Rom e in one. There need be no fear of an English Caesar. The “ orders” of Oceana are rehearsed at wearisome length and in utopian detail. T h ey have as their objective the construction of a scheme of participation for all citizens, based on the frequent assemblies of local communities or “ tribes” — a term equally of Greco-Rom an or of H ebrew resonance— which in many w ays resemble the county assemblies of the traditional English system: not least in their combin­ ing the functions of mustering and drilling the county militia and elect­ ing representatives to a national assembly. It is actually as they advance and retire in companies of horse and foot that the citizenry cast the “ golden volleys” of Venetian ballots which elect members of the assembly and senate of Oceana; Harrington is consciously dramatizing the identity of milizia and polizia .98 But the persons elected are less representatives in the proper sense than citizens taking their turn at participation and service, and lot as well as choice enters into the com­ plex, and deliberately Venetian, structures b y which the various assem­ blies and councils are chosen and function. Harrington is not unaware of that aspect of the mito di Venezia in which virtue appeared to have been mechanized and men fed into processes which made their behav­ ior intelligent and disinterested whether they so intended it or not— 96Toland, pp. 132-44. 97Toland, pp. 139-40. 98 See the speech of Hermes de Caduceo; Toland, pp. 92-94. 393

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the Platonic overtones noted in Contarini appear in the last and most systematic of his political w ritin gs"— but his dominant purpose is the release of personal virtue through civic participation. There is to be frequent rotation— Nedham had called it “ revolution” — in office, including the office of representation, not to ensure the supremacy of popular choice so much as to ensure the reality of the individual’s par­ ticipation; he is to take frequent turns at office, and is not to depute or alienate civic function to others. Rotation is Harrington’s equiva­ lent— as he thought it was V enice’s— for Machiavelli’s ridurre ai principii\ it is the constant renewal of virtue in and through action, and the astronomical language— “ galaxy,” “ primum m obile,” “ orb” — he liked to employ in the technical jargon of his utopia carries the sug­ gestion of the self-perpetuation of light, warmth, and life. So too did his invocation of H arvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. Rotation is also his solution for the problem of aristocracy. The members of the senate who discharge in his system the functions of the few — it should be noted that, the w ork of the legislator once done, there is not much role for a one— are regularly elected and regularly retire b y thirds. T h e y are defined, that is, less b y their quality as a social group than b y the political function they perform, which, according to the classical and Renaissance tradition, is rigorously confined to proposing laws and policies among which the people or assembly are to choose. The absolute separation of “ debate” from “ result,” in his term inology,100 was Harrington’s method of mechanizing virtue, of distinguishing and distributing the elements of the decision process so that men were obliged to act disinterestedly. But to have the few regu­ larly emerging from and returning to the body of the many was his w ay of demonstrating that there was no need to have an aristocratic class in order to have a functioning few . Some social differentiation, nevertheless, there had to be; the whole Aristotelian technique is built upon the relation of political functions to social characteristics. The senate is to be chosen b y the people from members of an equestrian order, for which there is a property qualification of ^ io o per annum;101 but greater importance seems to be attached to his firm belief that the many can be trusted to know the talented few when they see them. Out of tw enty men, he says, six will be of superior ability and the remaining fourteen will follow their lead; there is no need to estab­ lish elaborate mechanisms to ensure their selection, and the most impor­ tant precaution is to ensure that the differentiation of “ debate” and 99 A System of Politics, iv (Toland, pp. 468-70), ix (pp. 478-79). 100Toland, pp. 43-45, 48, 50-51, 71, 214-15, 416, 418-19. See above, pp. 255-6, 260, for Guicciardini’s, and pp. 287-9, 3°4> f ° r Giannotti’s use of the same distinction. 101 Toland, p. 78. 394

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“ result” provides for the performance of their proper functions b y the six and the fourteen.102 It is clear that the difference of talent between these two groups corresponds, in Harrington’s mind, to a difference of wealth, birth, and standing; the six will be gentlemen, they will have more property, leisure, experience, and tradition than the fourteen.103 But what matters is that the fourteen are left free to recognize these qualities for themselves, and that no hereditary and not much of a prop­ erty qualification is imposed to regulate their choice. The concept of deference— to employ a term favored b y modern scholars— which we are here meeting for the first time in English republican theory, though assuredly not for the first time in English social thought, is familiar to us from Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Guicciardini, and the last-named had employed it to distinguish carefully between aristocracy in a governo largo and in a governo stretto.104 From Harrington to John Adams, its role in Atlantic thought105 was to argue that the relations of aristocracy to democracy, crucial in any theory of mixed govern­ ment, took shape best in a society of relative freedom, mobility, and outspokenness: that aristocracy, although a function of property as well as personality, was a natural rather than an institutional phenome­ non, which worked best when it was not entrenched but left to the recognition of the many. A n entrenched aristocracy, in Nedham’s or Harrington’s view , was hard to establish in any w ay that did not ensure either conflict or corruption; and there was no need to make the attempt. The coincidence in time between Harrington’s writings and those of Vane or Milton or the Fifth Monarchists meant, however, that he had to consider the possibility of another kind of aristocracy, more formidable even than a hereditary order: that of a rule of the saints, an elite of spiritual experience whose qualifications could not, b y their nature, be judged b y the many. T o understand the full depth of this problem we must consider that he had successfully relocated England in a context not of traditional, but of classical time; English history now appeared, more positively than Florentine history had ever appeared to anyone after the early Bruni, part of the rise, fall, and rebirth of republican virtue, and the present moment was one at which England had the opportunity to recreate the commonwealth of armed freemen in such a form as had not existed since the days of Livian Rome. It has been a recurrent theme of this book that the moment of recreating the republic, that society in which men were what they 102 Toland, pp. 44-45, 236-38. 103 Toland, pp. 53, 125, 127. 104 See above, pp. 130-35, 227, 248, 253. 105 See especially Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), and below, ch. xV. 395

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ought to be, was hard to conceive without adding the concept of the apocalyptic moment, or moment at which grace acted in history; arid Harrington is not an exception. Oceana, we are told at one point, is uas the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley” ; the legislator chants over her beginnings the full rhapsody of the Song of Solom on,106 which any orthodox Christian would associate with the imagery of the church as Bride of Christ; and we hear elsewhere that the republic is the reign of the Son as the Mosaic commonwealth was the reign of the Father.107 But this is the moment at which the rule of the saints makes its appear­ ance, to challenge in its own fashion the equality of the citizens before God. The Elect Nation, that peculiarly English assertion of the priesthood of all believers, had since its first appearances been affirming the pri­ m acy of secular authority in a curious and characteristic blend of the languages of laicism and apocalyptic. If the pope’s claim to represent the presence of God, acting from the nunc-stans, in time was dismissed as false, then the secular community could assume the role of the com­ munity of faithful expecting Christ’s return in time. The supremacy of secular authority over any spiritually based challenge to its primacy thus became the test of the repudiation of Antichrist, and one by one Romish priests, Arminian bishops, and Scottish presbyters had appeared in the Antichristian role. T o the Independents of the sixteen-fifties Rom e remained the paradigmatic enemy, but jure divino presbyterianism ranked next; when Harrington’s legislator— who is in part a portrayal of Cromwell— approaches the end of his labors, it is largely for his victories over a foreign invader, obviously the Scot, that he is commemorated.108 But a rule of the saints, claiming a spiritual author­ ity, election, or illumination, not accessible to other men, presented a threat to the secular community in its spiritual role that was basically of the same order— hence W illiam Prynne’s announcement that Quak­ ers were Jesuits or Franciscans in disguise.109 In Books hi and iv of Leviathan, Hobbes had set out to erect a fortification against all these threats together. In his own highly individual w ay, he had employed the arguments of radical Protestantism to demonstrate the impossibility of any earthly agency’s exercising an authority peculiarly derived from Christ between his ascension and his return, or one immediately derived 106 Toland, p. 188. 107 Toland, p. 187: “ as the kingdom of God the father was a commonwealth, so shall the kingdom of God the son: the people shall be willing in the day of his pow er.” Cf. p. 195: “ I cannot conclude a circle (and such is this commonwealth) without turning the end into the beginning.” 108 Toland, p. 199. Antichrist, however, is not mentioned by name. 109 Lamont, Marginal Prynne, p. 141 and note.

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from God between the Mosaic theocracy that had ended with the elec­ tion of Saul and the theocracy that would be exercised b y Christ fol­ low ing his return and the resurrection of the dead. T he natural and artificial civil authority of Leviathan, which held the stage meanwhile, had indeed undivided sw ay over the preaching and interpretation of the prophetic word concerning G o d ’s return; but this could be exer­ cised only at the cost of incessant repetition of that word, which swept aw ay all Leviathan’s pseudo-spiritual rivals, but located him within a scheme of apocalyptic time and spoke of a day when his authority should be no more because theocracy had returned with the risen Christ.110 Hobbes and Harrington— the theorist of absolute sovereignty and the theorist of the commonwealth of participatory virtue— might seem as certain to quarrel as any two ideologues could be; and indeed H ar­ rington is fertile in attacks upon Hobbes’s theory of power, his hatred of the Greco-Rom an heritage, and his substitution of private and vol­ untary subjection for public and active virtue.111 But there is a further, and to them a deeper, sense in which they were at one, having the same enemies. Harrington, like Hobbes, was anxious to prove that the first presbyters and deacons ordained b y the Apostles were not consecrated in a priestly succession, but elected in assemblies;112 and, like most Inde­ pendents, whether Erastian or congregationalist in their leanings, he desired to prove this against papists, episcopalians, and presbyterians all together. There was a wealth of literature on the subject from which he might have drawn arguments; what held him close to Hobbes must have been the desire of both men to show that the agency elect­ ing the presbyters and deacons had been a civil agency, and that— to Harrington at least— the primitive ecclesiae had been assemblies of citi­ zens in the Athenian sense of the noun ekklesia.113 Th e impulse was to prove that the choice of a clergy is a civil choice, carried out b y the civil sovereign; and, profoundly as Harrington and Hobbes differed in their theories of sovereignty, a self-sufficient polis or commonwealth is, as Hobbes emphasized, as sovereign over its own affairs as any king­ dom subject to Leviathan can possibly be. And the enemies were the same. Harrington’s longest polemic on the question o f primitive ordina­ tion, directed against the Anglican H enry Hammond, is aimed at a 110 Politics, Language and Tim e, pp. 148-201. 111 Toland, pp. 35-37, 38-39, 42-43, 45-46, 49-50, 53, 54, 65, 71, 241. 112 Prerogative of Popular Government, Book 11 (Toland, pp. 304-54); A rt of Lawgiving, ch. vi (Toland, pp. 398-400); Leviathan, Book 111, ch. 42 (ed. Oakeshott, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, n.d.), pp. 322-83. 113 Toland, pp. 48 (“the church or assembly of the people” ), 316-17, and Prerog­ ative of Popular Government, 11, passim. 397

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passage of the latter’s writings, page b y page and point b y point, where Hammond had been attacking Hobbes.114 Hobbes had presented Leviathan’s kingdom as occupying the present interval between the direct rule of G od exercised in the Mosaic theo­ cracy and the direct rule of G od that would be exercised by the risen Christ. He had consequently emphasized the identity of both theocra­ cies and their monarchical character; the authority that God would exercise through the human nature of Christ, he had exercised through his vice-gerents from Moses to Samuel. Harrington, however, insisted that the Mosaic commonwealth had been a true classical republic, and that the authority electing the officers of religion had been that of the people in their orders, as when they elected the officers of state.115 He did not feel obliged to part company with Hobbes when he said this. The overriding aim was the destruction of any claim on the part of a clergy to independently derived spiritual authority, and a republic could assert civil sovereignty as effectively as could a monarchy. The appeal to theocracy— another mode of denying the independence of a priesthood— would be maintained b y repeating, and Harrington does repeat, that a republic, that regime in which all citizens are equal, is that in which they are all equally free under God. Consequently, a republic is a theocracy; it is that realm of which Christ is K ing.116 Savonarola had said this long ago, and Vane and the Fifth Monarchists were saying it still. T o Harrington, however, their claim was false, since they were claiming for themselves an authority, as an elite or elect, which they denied to other citizens.117 T h ey were denying the republic, and denying Christ’s kingdom b y claiming it for themselves. Their role was not far from becoming that of Antichrist. Even at Sinai, however, the republic had not been a simple matter of revelation. Harrington insisted that the orders of civil society, which it developed and embodied, were accessible to human reason, and that 114 Toland, pp. 335-54. Henry Hammond, A Letter of Resolution to Six Quaeres, of Present Use in the Church of England (1653), in Works of H enry Hammond (London, 4 vols., dated between 1671 and 1684; here vol. 1, dated m d c l x x iv ) . The fifth “ quaere” concerns ordination and is answered by an attack on ch. 42 of Leviathan (vol. 1, pp. 512-29). Harrington concludes that Hammond’s attack has failed, and mentions Hobbes by name. 1 1 5 Toland, pp. 46-48, 75, 99, 147, 166-67 (Oceana); 234-41, 272-74, 283-84, 32033, 357 (Prerogative of Popular Governm ent); 363, 372-98 (Art of Lawgiving). 116 Toland, pp. 187 above, and 194: “ . . . but a commonwealth is a monarchy; to her God is king, in as much as reason, his dictat, is her soverain power.” Thus Toland; the original (as corrected by Harrington) reads “where God is king.” 117 Toland, pp. 469 (A System of Politics, iv, 23), 574 (A Discourse upon this Saying . . .), 580-84 (A Parallel of the Spirit of the People with the Spirit of Mr. Rogers).

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God did not act contrary to the intelligible natural order.118 W here Machiavelli had juxtaposed Moses with the heathen legislators in a w ay which cannot be stripped of irony, Harrington many times cited a text in which Moses accepted advice on the foundation of civil institutions from his Midianite father-in-law Jethro, a gentile and a heathen.119 Here, he liked to say, were prophet and legislator, divine word and natural reason, w orking in harmony. But there is a further sense in which the republic displays a millennial aspect beyond anything to be found in Hobbes. If theocracy was exercised through a direct repre­ sentation of G od in the person of Moses, and is to be exercised through another in the person of the risen Christ, then Leviathan, who is only G o d ’s representative naturally and artificially, cannot exercise theoc­ racy and can only expect its return. But if Israel’s being a republic made it also a theocracy, then Oceana, the restored republic which is both Israel and Rom e redivivus, may be in an intelligible sense Christ’s kingdom returned. Hence the im agery of the Bride of Christ, and the other apocalyptic significances with which Oceana is invested. Levia­ than can only expect Christ’s kingdom at the end of time; Oceana may be that kingdom already come, and merging the millennium with the after-world. There is a difference between a mortal god and an immor­ tal commonwealth. But only a few of the types and shadows attending the serene edi­ fice of Oceana are millennial. W e are more likely to feel that Harring­ ton and Hobbes, like Prynne and Marvell, ended b y subordinating spiritual experience to political, and paradoxically employed to this purpose the prophetic dimension which their thought could not escape. Hobbes deliberately undermined the possibility of direct religious experience in all but the rarest of cases, and reduced the religious life to obeying Leviathan and acknowledging the power of G od and the soterial mission of Jesus. Harrington, follow ing the humanist path, obliterated the saint— while retaining a soterial function for “ gathered congregations” 120— and came close to leaving the practice of civic vir­ tue by citizens as the sole prerequisite for the regnum Christi .121 His 118 Toland, pp. 214-15, 248, 272-73, 300, 342 (“Neither God nor Christ ever insti­ tuted any policy whatsoever upon any other principles than those of human pru­ dence” ), 347, 371-72, 401. 119 E.g., Toland, pp. 48, 74 (“ . . . my Lord Archon, taking council of the commonwealth of Israel, as of Moses; and of the rest of the commonwealths, as of Jethro” ) ; and passim. 120 Toland, p. 55. 121 Toland, p. 489: “As the natural body of a Christian or Saint can be no other for the frame, than such as has bin the natural body of an Israelit or of a Heathen; so the political bodys, or civil governments of Christians or Saints can be no other for the frame, than such as have bin the political bodys or civil 399

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clergy are to be mere men of learning, interpreting the word of God because they know the ancient tongues in which it was delivered;122 Pentecost has almost disappeared. But because of the availability of an eschatological rhetoric which implied the imminence of a millennium or return, Harrington— whatever may be true of Hobbes— avoided speaking of his republic as existing in a rigorously secular time. He did not use the terms virtu and corruption, as Machiavelli had used them, in such a w av as to depict civic man in a world which neither custom nor grace was stabilizing. That perspective was to return when H ar­ rington’s ideas were used in a society no longer millennially oriented. governments of the Israelits, or of the Heathens.” P. 490: “The highest earthly felicity that a people can ask, or God can give, is an equal and well-order’d commonwealth. Such a one among the Israelits, was the reign of God; and such a one (for the same reason) may be among Christians the reign of Christ, tho not every one in the Christian commonwealth should be any more a Christian indeed, than every one in the Israelitish commonwealth was an Israelit indeed.” 122 Toland, pp. 82, 166-69, 42I> 47^*

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T H E A N G LIC IZA T IO N OF T H E REPUBLIC b)

Court, Country and Standing Army

[i] i n t h e t w o p r e c e d i n g c h a p t e r s we have examined the emergence and establishment of civic and Machiavellian modes of understanding politics in the language and thought of Stuart and Puritan England. The conceptual universe which obtained there was very different from that of Florence, and we had to go a long w av about to understand w hy it became necessary to envisage England as a classical republic at all; but it mav still be described as the same universe, dominated by the same paradigms, as those employed in constructing the model which has guided this book. The world of particular events was ill under­ stood and regarded as a consequence of human irrationality, a zone of secular instability which it was the business of politics to control (if it was not the sin of politics to have created it); and the paradigms of custom, grace, and fortune provided the vocabularies available for guiding the intellect through the dangerous paths of historical exist­ ence. W hen civil war afflicted a monarchy which had been considered a representation of eternal order, we encountered one group of think­ ers (to which Hobbes in a sense belonged) prepared to isolate a time­ less “ moment of nature,” and out of it to reconstitute authority as a rigorously natural phenomenon; but the heterogeneous arguments of Nedham, and the paradoxical relationship discovered between Hobbes and Harrington, showed us the appeal to nature and authority coexist­ ing closelv with an appeal to fortune, anakukldsis, and the republic, and this latter with a further appeal to grace, illumination, and apoca­ lypse. It can be contended, therefore, that down to the exhaustion of the Puritan radical impulses, English political thought continued to face the challenge of the epistemology of the saeculum, and that the vision of England as a classical republic was constructed as a means of meeting that challenge, in the terms in which the languages familiar to us both posed it and recommended its solution. During the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, however, W estern political and social thought passed from its post-medieval to

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its early modern stage. A massive increase in the capacity for historical self-understanding was one feature of this transition, and it could not have occurred without considerable modification of that rigorously limited epistemology of the secular with which we have been con­ cerned. T he causes of epistemological change in this era were nu­ merous and complex, but w e are going to find that the language of republican humanism played an important part in the process, and con­ sequently entered upon a paradoxical relationship with the epistemology that had helped to give it birth. The civic humanists of the Renaissance had faced the almost insoluble problem of constituting the republic as both a universal community of value and a phenomenon in the world of particularity; their theory had consequently presented it as a device for mobilizing all rationality and all value, and remaining stable as a totality of virtue. This set of problems remained fundamental for postRenaissance and Enlightenment minds; but in the intellectual lineage running through Bruni, Machiavelli, and Harrington, theories of mixed government, of arms, and finally of property had provided— at least for those able to overlook Machiavelli’s underlying pessimism— a set of norms for the attainment of stability which reduced the totality of virtue to concrete and manageable terms. W hat we shall see happening is that these became parameters for the measurement of historical change. T o the extent that they did so they greatly increased the capac­ ity for historical understanding, simply by enriching its technical vo­ cabulary. But at the same time they obliged thinkers to evaluate change negatively, as a movement aw ay from the norms which defined it, as they defined stability, rationality, and virtue. The ancient equation of change with degeneration and entropy thus held fast; what was new in the situation was that it could now be defined not as sheer disorder, but in terms of intelligible social and material processes. T he antithesis of virtue ceased to be fortuna, but became corruption instead. A n increase in the capacity of W estern men to understand history presented itself in the form of an acute and growing awareness o f the potential quarrel be­ tween value and history, virtue and history, personality and history; and the growth of theories of progress during the eighteenth century is not to be understood without understanding of this counterpoint. Such was to be the final contribution of the classical image of man as finding his fulfillment in citizenship. A romantic theory of personality was the necessary response. These movements of thought will be considered as occurring mainly in an English and American context, and as a preliminary step it is desirable to ask what general changes seem to have taken place in the languages of custom, grace, and fortune, follow ing the revolutionary upheavals of the middle seventeenth century. First it should be noted 402

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that the habit of presenting English politics in terms of grace and apocalyptic underwent after 1660 a rather sharp decline. T he vocabu­ lary of G o d ly Rule and the Elect Nation, already perhaps eroded b y disillusionment, now seemed part of that spirit of “ enthusiasm” which resurgent Anglicanism sought to expunge for the next century and more. T he apocalyptic dimension was, indeed, too integrally a part of the age’s thinking to be m erely canceled and annulled; it survived in preaching, in literature, and in several areas of the public mind;1 but as a recognized political language with radical possibilities it was long eclipsed and never fully recovered. Foxe’s Acts and Monuments sur­ vived as a m artyrology and a source of atrocity stories, but ceased to form part of the essential scaffolding of the English mind. Ernest Tuveson2 has, however, shown that there were ways in which apoca­ lyptic continued to perform its characteristic if paradoxical function as a means of secularization. The revolutionary chiliasts had increas­ ingly envisaged the millennium as a period in which the rational pow ­ ers of the human mind should be sanctified, illumined, and set free to rule; and as rational religion steadily prevailed over prophetic “ enthusi­ asm,” the apocalyptic mode remained viable, and appealed to Anglicans of the latitudinarian tradition as a means of depicting a future utopia in which men should have learned from G od all that he had to teach them. There are signs of a paradox in the English intellectual scene: republicans like Toland, in so many w ays the heirs o f the Puritans, emerge as Deists and foes of the prophetic tradition, while the apoca­ lyptic mode of thought is carried on b y latitudinarians who are pro­ fessed enemies of “ enthusiasm.” But the republic as millennium has been important enough to our theme to warn us to watch for apocalyptic overtones in post-Puritan republicanism, and it is significant also that in the American colonies, where the revulsion against “ enthusiasm” was never so great, Tuveson finds it possible to speak of an “ apocalyptic W higgism ” and audible notes of messianism m ay be heard to this day. But it was one thing for millennial expectation to serve as a framework in which to present schemes of rational optimism and rational explana­ tion; quite another for it to serve as a surrogate in the absence of any ability to supply them. Its day was not done, but it was for the present removed from the center of attention. 1 See William M. Lamont, “Richard Baxter, the Apocalypse and the Mad Major,” Past and Present 55 (1972), 68-90; M. C. Jacob and W . A. Lockwood, “Political Millenarianism and Burnet’s Sacred T heory,” Science Studies 2 (1972), 265-79. 2 Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949); The Redeemer Nation: the Idea of America's Millennial Role (University of Chicago Press, 1968). 4 03

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The language of custom, on the other hand, seems to have both sur­ vived and revived during and after the restoration of the monarchy. T h e ideological context of Harrington’s writings was that of an unsuc­ cessful attempt to prevent the revival of a house of lords and the return of government b y three estates— the formula of the A nsw er to the N ineteen Propositions which had equated the classical balance of one, few , and many with the traditional structure of king, lords, and com­ mons. E ve ry step in the process of restoration which began in 1658— the return to the traditional franchise, to the hereditary peerage, and finally to the historic monarchy itself— was a return, under an increas­ ingly thin veil of “ mixed government,” to that Ancient Constitution whose legitimacy and authority were held to derive from the imme­ morial continuities of custom. The writings of Sir Matthew Hale (d. 1675), the Chief Justice who had upheld the common law throughout the Protectorate, form one of the most brilliant articulations3 of the philosophy of custom— of usage, presumption,4 and prescription— that links Fortescue, Coke, and Edmund Burke. It is true that, a few years after Hale’s death, the doctrine of the Ancient Constitution underwent unforgettably damaging attacks from a group of T o ry scholars led by R obert Brady, who employed the feudal interpretation of English his­ tory to demonstrate that the constitution was neither immemorial nor customary, but owed its being to royal action and social change.5 But it would be an oversimplification to suppose that the historic constitu­ tion was now prepared to abandon its foundation in antiquity. It is argued b y Corinne W eston6 that the assertion by Exclusionists of the antiquity of the commons, which called down the rebuttals of Brady and his friends, was intended to claim for the two houses that coordi­ nate authority in legislation which the K ing's A nsw er had seemed to concede them in 1642, and that the intention of the T o ry writers was to refute this claim and leave the king in possession of the initiative. If this interpretation can be accepted, it would follow that it was not their main purpose to set the authority of the Crown above that of custom, but to deny that the constitution was reducible to any formal distribu­ tion of powers. Its true character, they argued, must be found in com­ plex processes and the actions of past kings and parliaments, dictated 3 The Ancient Constitution, pp. 170-81; Politics, Language and Tim e, pp. 21622, 262-64. 4 But it has been pointed out by Paul Lucas that Burke was modifying the nor­ mal legal usage of this term; see “ On Edmund Burke’s Doctrine of Prescription: or, an Appeal from the N ew to the Old Lawyers,” The Historical Journal 11, no. 1 (1968), 35-63. 5 The Ancient Constitution, pp. 182-228. 6 See her “Legal Sovereignty in the Brady Controversy,” in The Historical Jour­ nal 15, no. 3 (1972), 409-32.

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b y the needs of the moments in which they were taken. Such a per­ spective is not altogether unlike that of Hale’s philosophy of custom, in which every moment is unique and part of a continuous flow of emergencies; the only, if crucial, difference is that the historian pro­ poses to know and resurrect each past moment in its particularity, the law yer m erely to presume its existence in its continuity with others. But wherever there were common lawyers, the language of use, tra­ dition, and immemorial antiquity was sure to flourish; it did so throughout the eighteenth century, alongside many different modes of thought, and its reassertion by Burke himself was neither archaism nor antiquarianism.7 T he third language of our model is that with whose further history we are concerned, but we should remind ourselves that it was no longer founded upon the prim acy of ideas about fortune. Calvinist predestinarianism, the growth from many sources of a vocabulary of secondary causation, perhaps the decay of the Aristotelian stress upon form and telos, had heavily eroded the conception of external circumstance as a random, irrational, deforming force. It may also be arguable (it usually is) that changing social conditions were exercising an influence as well; an interesting study in historical semantics might be written to show how a man’s or wom an’s “ fortune” came to bear the predominantly monetary meanings of inheritance, acquisition, or d o w ry.8 A t all events, we are about to enter upon a period in which the terms virtue, virtus, and virtu are of great significance in their Roman and Renaissance con­ notations, but their antithesis is no longer circumstantial fortuna so much as historical corruption. A general reason for this we already know. T he material and moral conditions necessary to the common­ wealth in which virtue was possible had been established in a series of increasingly acceptable paradigms; the problem now seemed to be legis­ lative and political— could these conditions be established, and if so could they be maintained?— and to admit of answers in material and moral, rather than voluntarist or charismatic, terms. T h e virtii of the prince seemed of less immediate concern than the virtue of the legisla­ tor, senator, or citizen. But to understand the exact shapes in which these problems presented themselves, we have to begin b y understand­ ing how it was that the formulations of Machiavellian and Harringtonian republicanism came to appear appropriate in the parliamentary monarchy of Restoration England. 7 Politics, Language and Tim e, pp. 227-31. 8 The older terminology survives in usages such as “soldier of fortune,” mean­ ing a mercenary, or “gentleman of fortune” (if anyone ever really said this), meaning a pirate. The notion of a woman’s “virtue,” it is interesting to note, acquired as specifically sexist a meaning as that of her “fortune.” 4°5

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The moment at which this began to happen can be conveniently located at— and in fact has not yet been traced much earlier than— the year 1675, in which also Hale died and the controversy over the feudal origins of parliament began again to get under w ay. T he first known authors of what has been called the neo-Harringtonian interpretation9 of English politics were the writer o f a pamphlet entitled A Letter from a Person o f Quality to his Friend in the C ountry , 1 0 who may just possibly have been John Locke and was certainly someone as close as he was to the Earl of Shaftesbury,11 and Shaftesbury himself in a speech to the House of Lords.12 Other more or less Shaftesburean pamphlets may be associated with these, and in 1677 Andrew Marvell, a more independent figure, published his A ccount o f the G row th o f Popery and A rbitrary G overnm ent, which belongs to the same intellectual stream. Finally, in 1680, at the height of the controversy over the Bill of Exclusion, H enry Neville, an old associate of Harrington himself and not, strictly speaking, an Exclusionist at all,13 published Plato R edivivus, a political dialogue which may be taken as the culmination of the first attempt to restate Harringtonian doctrine in a form appropri­ ate to the realities of the Restoration. There are three circumstances which are crucial to the understand­ ing of this first manifestation of neo-Harringtonianism. The first is that Shaftesbury was contending against the endeavors of the king’s minis­ ter, Danby, to build up a “ Court party” in the House of Commons by means involving patronage, places, and pensions. The second is that he chose to link this allegedly sinister influence with the growth of a pro­ fessional or “ standing” army. The third is that his argument was not only delivered in the House of Lords— in which he sat— but was, like N eville’s after him, intimately bound up with the fact of the House’s continued existence. T o take these in order, the policies of Danby are usually taken as marking the revival of the Crow n’s efforts to master the arts of parliamentary management, at which the first two Stuarts, as well as Oliver Protector, had been notably unsuccessful; its impor9 Politics, Language and Tim e, p. 115. This essay was first published in 1966. For the beginnings in 1675 of the “Brady controversy” see The Ancient Constitu­ tion, ch. 7. 10 Printed in State Tracts . . . in the Reign of Charles 11 . . . (London, 1693), pp. 41-56, and in Parliamentary History of England, iv, xxxviii-lxvii. 11 For a discussion of this question, see K.H .D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftes­ bury (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 390-93. 12 Printed in State Tracts .. .in the Reign of Charles I I . . . , pp. 57-61. 13 Plato Redivivus argues for limitations on the power of a Catholic successor, not for his exclusion from the throne.

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tance for our purposes is that the polemical counterattack promoted b y Shaftesbury restated the old antithesis o f “ Court” and “ Country” in a new form, one based on employment of the civic and republican concept of “ corruption,” in a version which owed much to Harring­ ton and was at the same time decisive in developing the theory known to us as “ the separation of powers.” T he “ Court” which came under attack from this time on was composed no longer of courtiers or of servants of the king’s prerogative, so much as of “ ministers” — a key term, usually o f opprobrium, in W hig ideology— who were seen as em­ ploying patronage in the attempt to render parliament compliant with the administration’s policies. Opposition politicians hostile to these en­ deavors sought to represent them as illegitimate, and did so b y terming patronage “ corruption” — not merely in the sense that it overstepped the proper limits of royal favor and entered the sphere of bribery and venality, but also in the sense that we noted first in G uicciar­ dini: the substitution of private for public authority, of dependence for independence. Patronage, it was argued b y the pioneers of the “ Country” ideology, rendered representatives of the people, who ought to be as independent as those they represented, dependent upon the Court and the ministers from whom they received it; and dependence was worse, because more lasting, than mere venality— if it was bad that a member should receive a purse of guineas for voting with the Court, it was ten times worse that he should receive a pension, or hold an office, in the Court’s gift, since this rendered subservience to the Court his permanent interest. From this there arose two of the most recur­ rent if never-satisfied demands in the “ Country” political program: that for the exclusion of officeholders or “ placemen” from the House of Commons, and that for short, i.e., frequently elected, parliaments— tri­ ennial if annual could not be secured— on the grounds that to send members regularly back to their constituents for reelection was the best means o f ensuring that they did not become dependents of the Court. It is important to realize that this demand— with its echoes of 16471648 and the G ood Old Cause— was consciously seen as a Machiavellian ridurre ai principii, and b y enthusiasts almost as a Savonarolan rinnovazione\ it was designed to secure the same principle as Harrington had aimed at with his mechanisms of rotation, namely the perpetual renewal of independence, freedom, and virtue. The people were free and independent, as was the role of their representative; the moment of election, then— we should recall the raptures of Harrington’s Hermes de Caduceo14— was a moment of freedom, nature, and political innocence, in which a basic principle of government was affirmed; and, 14 Above, ch. xi, n. 98. 4°7

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as Machiavelli would have agreed, such could not be affirmed too often. But if the freedom of people and representative consisted in their inde­ pendence, it followed, to men who had read Harrington and to men who had not needed to read him, that freedom and independence con­ sisted in property. The gentry and freeholders of the shires and county boroughs, whom the term “ Country” normally comprised, w ere entit­ led in these terms to see themselves as a classical populus, a community of virtue, and to see their virtue as consisting in their freeholds. But it was at that very point that the menace of “ corruption” became actual; place and pension constituted a species of property, or at least of liveli­ hood, one which rendered the recipient dependent upon the donor; M arvell compared such clients with the blue-coated retainer of bastard feudalism; and the patrons on whom the corrupt representative became dependent might not be m erely some powerful faction— setta or intel­ lig e n t in the Florentine vocabulary— of dominant “ particular men,” but the ministers of the royal executive, form ing either a new and ille­ gitimate agency of government ( “ ministers” ) or an old one (“ Court” or “ executive” ) grow n corrupt and corrupting through having stepped out of its proper place. The language of “ balanced government” and “ separation of powers” took on a new meaning— beyond anything to be found in the A n sw er to the N ineteen Propositions or in H arring­ ton’s philo-Venetian desire to separate “ debate” from “ result” — when it presented, as the principal enemy of virtue and liberty, a “ corrup­ tion” springing from the economic dependence of members of the legislative upon resources controlled b y the executive. T o this threat any formal weakness in the distribution, or “ separation,” of powers as between executive and legislative was, at bottom, secondary. The key term is “ corruption,” which marks a further stage in the assimilation of English constitutional theory to the categories and vocabulary of civic republicanism. Marvell could see clearly enough that there were not one but two corrupting agencies at work. The opposition politicians who denounced the corruption of ministers might be aiming simply to replace them and continue w orking with their tools; and in The G ro w th o f Popery and Arbitrary G overnm ent, he drew an early por­ trait of parliament along what we know as “ Namierite” lines: the Court interest, the opposition factions, and the independent back­ benchers or “ Country members.” 15 But, unlike Sir Lew is Namier, he maximized the role of corruption by attributing it to ministers, faction leaders and their respective followings, in equal and unmitigated 15 1677 ed., pp. 74-81. Grosart (ed.), Complete Works of A ndrew Marvell (Fuller Worthies Library, 1875), iv, 322-32. The analogy between factions and retainers is at Grosart, p. 331.

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degree; from which it followed that virtue was represented only by the Country members, that their defense of it was static if not passive, and that corruption could be avoided only b y those willing both to enjoy no source of income but their estates, and to eschew either the possession or the pursuit of executive power. And it further followed that all power corrupted; that government itself, and parliament con­ sidered as a place where power was actually exercised or sought after, could not but be visualized as a mechanism for the corruption of prop­ erty, independence, and virtue. The ideology that objects to power as such, long established in an England where Country habitually mis­ trusted Court and property government, was being pow erfully rein­ forced b y the adoption of the civic vocabulary; and it was to be the recurrent problem of all Country parties that they could not take office without falsifying their own ostensible values— a problem on which Dr. Johnson was commenting in his dictum that patriotism (a term which had carried “ Country” and “ commonwealth” connotations since the seventeenth century) was the last refuge of the scoundrel. The prob­ lem became inescapable once it was conceded that the executive must win majorities in the legislature, and must win them b y means of patronage— a concession implied by Shaftesbury and Marvell alike in their indictments of Danby. There was an ultimate incompatibility between civic republicanism and the facts of legislative sovereignty and king-in-parliament; but for the present the latter provided a vocabu­ lary more flexible and revealing than any other for the conduct, as well as the criticism, of the latter. In Harrington neither Court, corruption, nor office had been major elements of political analysis; his perspective had been too sanguine and millennial; but it is of significance that the only parliamentary debate in which speakers had employed ideas taken directly from his writings had been the long struggle carried on b y the republican group in R ich­ ard Crom well’s parliament to avert recognition o f the “ Other House” established b y the Petition and A dvice. W e earlier considered the lastnamed document as marking the return to the three estates of the A nsw er to the N ineteen Propositions and the Ancient Constitution; but the Harringtonian campaign against the Other House had been waged mainly on the assumption that, since it was impossible to restore the historic peerage, a nonrotatory or “ standing” upper chamber must con­ sist largely of major-generals and other military grandees, and only the gathering restorationist backlash had led, contrary to Harringtonian assumptions, to demands for the return of the “ old lords” as defenders of the Ancient Constitution. The attack upon arm y officers as mem­ bers of an entrenched (if not hereditary) aristocracy had been based in large measure on the assumption that to include them in an upper 4 09

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house would be to entrench the army, and the taxation that main­ tained it, in the constitution; they would sit in parliament for life, and perhaps their heirs after them, and vote themselves the taxes off which they lived.16 The debate of 1659 had therefore been an early and spe­ cial instance of that complaint against placemen and corruption of which so much was to be heard in later years— military senators would be dependents of state and means of bringing parliament into depend­ ence on state— but there is a further significance in the circumstance that it was army placemen who then came under attack. B y 1675 the phrase “ a standing arm y” was among the common coinage of English political debate, and the Shaftesburean writers were regularly coupling it with corruption and regularly opposing it to the ideal of the militia. A standing Parliament and a standing A rm y are like those Tw ins that have their lower parts united, and are divided only above the N avel; they were born together and cannot long out-live each other.17 T he same might be said concerning the only Ancient and true Strength of the Nation, the Legal Militia, and a standing A rm y. The Militia must, and can never be otherwise than for English L ib erty , because else it doth destroy itself; but a standing Force can be for nothing but Prerogative, by whom it hath its idle living and Subsistence.18 The Civil W ar of 1642 had broken out in a dispute between king and parliament for control of the county militia, and had, until the regi­ ments were new-modeled, been fought between elements of that armed force, the only one which England then possessed. Some of the opposi­ tion to Crom well’s Protectorate from within the army had come from N ew Model idealists who still believed themselves to be a people in arms and resented being placed under the direct control of the head of state. The Restoration of 1660— itself in part the work of an arm y w ill­ ing to disband itself rather than live at free quarter— had carried with it an unequivocal declaration vesting control of the militia in the king; but a necessary counterpoint to this principle had been an unspoken but no less unequivocal insistence that it should only be the county militia— the freeholders in arms under the gentry as their natural lead­ ers— over which the king was to exercise command. There are some manuscript tracts, of Harringtonian inspiration, which recognize that a monarch logically needs a militia more immediately dependent upon 16 “James Harrington and the Good Old Cause,” above, ch. xi, n. 49. 17 T w o Seasonable Discourses, in State Tracts . . . in the Reign of Charles / / . . . , p. 68. 18 A Letter from a Parliament Man to his Friend, ibid., p. 70. 410

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him;19 and a few stalwarts regretted the abolition of feudal tenures for precisely this reason— a feudal host would be the embodiment of an England where every proprietor’s land bound him to direct service and homage.20 It was then a Restoration understanding that the king should command, but should command only the Country, the pro­ prietors in arms; and any attempt on the part of the Crown to acquire added military strength must touch a very sensitive nerve indeed. “ The guards are mercenary, and therefore dangerous,” was the observation of an ultra-Cavalier speaker in the House of Commons.21 The term “ standing arm y” had been known to Harrington, and he had employed it to denote something politically undesirable: the troops of soldiery kept permanently available to a supreme magistrate, like the guards used b y ancient tyrants to establish unlawful power, but briefly permitted to the Lord Archon of Oceana in his capacity as legislator and pater patriae, in recognition of his incorruptible and indeed superhuman virtue.22 Harrington had also employed the term in a more precisely military sense, as the antithesis of “ marching arm y,” which meant one taking the field against a real enemy or present danger.23 A “ standing arm y,” then, was one embodied but not in the field, resembling the “ standing army in time of peace” made subject to parliamentary consent in the Bill of Rights of 1689. But under the orders of Oceana, standing and marching arm y alike are composed of citizens, and it is only an improper subjection to the authority of a sin­ gle magistrate which might render the former politically dangerous. B y 1675, however, a change of profound importance was coming over the meaning of the term. It was beginning to be used to denote an army of professional officers and long-service soldiers, commanded, maintained, and above all paid b y the state. Such an arm y differed from the condottieri o f the Italian writers in being no band of free com­ panions available for hire b y any ruler, and from Machiavelli’s sudditi and creati, or H arrington’s janissaries and vassals, in not being person­ ally dependent on any prince or overlord. T h e y were (or might be) Englishmen serving a lawful and public authority, but doing so as full­ time professionals practicing what Machiavelli had called an arte, for which they were paid, on a permanent basis, out of no private purse but from monies raised by public authority and disbursed b y public officials. This was something new in the world; the mercenaries of the 19 E.g., British Museum, Lansdowne MSS. 805, fols. 75-82. 20 The best-known proponent of this view (not in a directly Harringtonian form) was Fabian Philipps; see The Ancient Constitution, pp. 215-17. 21 Colonel Strangways, 29 April 1675; Parliamentary H istory, iv, 696. Cf., ibid., pp. 461, 467, 604-608. 22 Toland, op.cit., pp. 200, 203-204. 23 Toland, pp. 77, 101, 114, 190, 207.

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T h irty Years W ar had been condottieri more often than not, and, even where they were embryo national armies, had soon exhausted their governments’ power to maintain them, bankrupting their princes and devastating countrysides wherever they went, in an incessant second­ ary war against the peasantry, brought on by their search for food and specie. W hat was new was, at bottom, the strengthened financial struc­ tures which were enabling states to maintain them permanently; and how new this capacity was is indicated b y the fact that Harrington, tw enty years earlier, had flatly declared it impossible. A n arm y could never be maintained by direct taxation, he said, because of the bitter resistance of the taxpayers;24 and “ a bank never paid an army, or, pay­ ing an army, soon became no bank.” 25 If he conceded that Holland and Genoa might be exceptions— it is not certain that he did— he covered himself with the remark that “ where there is a bank, ten to one it is a commonwealth” ;26 and there were good reasons for doubting if even these great consortia could meet the costs of a seventeenth-century land arm y for ever. It is crucial to Harrington’s whole theory that warriors can be maintained, in the last analysis, only by settling them on the land, and that the question is whether this will be done in w ays that establish an Asian slave-monarchy, a feudal aristocracy, or a republican citizenry.27 The ideas that a mercantile society can maintain a perma­ nent (as distinct from recurrent) professional army, or that a mon­ archy could rule such a society with the aid of a military bureaucracy, were rejected. But b y the later seventies, such possibilities were becoming apparent. The guards and other regiments maintained b y the English Crown were not numerous compared with what was to come, but they were beginning to resemble a permanent establishment.28 Bureaucracies existed at court to pay and equip them, and among the miscellaneous (and suspect) sources from which the monies came there figured grants which parliament had been prevailed upon to make. T o those who believed or professed to believe that ministers like Danby were cor­ rupting the two houses with patronage, this presented a double threat: the grants which increased the numbers of serving officers and civilian bureaucrats at the same moment increased the numbers of place-holders who might come to sit in parliament and vote grants and taxes to main­ tain them as dependents of the executive; and since the process was self-multiplying and cancerous, parliament was being brought to fur­ 24 Toland, p. 67. 25 Toland, p. 227. 26 Toland, p. 230. 27 Toland, p. 65. 28 For a recent study of their character, see J. R. Western, Monarchy and Revolution: the English State in the 168os (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,

1972).

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ther its own corruption and subjugation. It was the complaint of 1659 in new and graver tones: instead of a m ilitary aristocracy entrenched in an Other House, a military and civilian dependency was now being engrafted upon the commons, and instead of the N e w Model arm y— which had indeed never been a “ standing arm y” in the new sense— incessantly searching for an executive capable of maintaining it, the restored Crown was proving to be an executive capable of building up its m ilitary force b y manipulating and disturbing the traditional con­ stitutional relationships. In his speech of October 1675, Shaftesbury remarked in part: The K ing governing and administering Justice b y his House of Lords, and advising with both his Houses of Parliament in all impor­ tant matters, is the Government I own, am born under, and am obliged to. If ever there should happen in future Ages (which God forbid) a K in g governing b y an A rm y, without his Parliament, ’tis a Governm ent I own not, am not obliged to, nor was born under.29 This vaguely ominous language invokes the balance of three estates described in the A n sw er to the N ineteen Propositions; but the threat to legitim acy is not simply that of military dictatorship. Shaftesbury’s hearers (his fellow-peers) are perhaps expected to remember Charles I demanding the Five Members or Cromwell expelling the Rum p; but the underlying menace is that of corruption rather than coercion. The “ K ing governing b y an A rm y ” is no Cromwell, but a Continental potentate who does not depend upon his estates to supply his standing troops,30 and the rhetorical setting to which Shaftesbury’s speech belongs plainly indicates that in England this is to be achieved through the corruption of parliament. The professional officer is the cause as well as the effect of this corruption, and his capacity to act in this bane­ ful w ay arises from the fact that his decision to become a professional has rendered him the lifelong dependent of the state that can employ him. Harrington— however limited his understanding of contemporary trends in military organization— had argued that a main reason for the survival of “ Gothic m onarchy” in France was that the French noblesses had now become dependent on the king for their careers, those of the sword expecting to serve him in his armies, those of the robe in his courts and administration.31 The English freeholders could not be transformed into a service nobility, but they might be corrupted through too much exposure to the pursuit of place. W e recall what Lodovico Alamanni might have said o f such a process, but in England 29 State Tracts . . .in the Reign of Charles I I . . . , p. 60. 30 Politics, Language and Tim e, pp. 121-23. 31 Toland, pp. 252-56.

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the nightmare possibility now existed that parliament, the traditional defender of the freeholders’ liberties, was becoming the means of cor­ rupting and transforming their natures. This was the setting in which the myth of the English militia became potent, and did so in a recog­ nizably Harringtonian form. The pamphleteer who declared that the militia could never act against liberty unless willing to destroy itself meant that it was the property and independence of the people in arms. T o Harrington this had been the precondition which rendered a repub­ lic inescapable; to men of 1675 it was the guarantee of freedom, virtue, and stability in a restored mixed government of king, lords, and com­ mons, operating to prevent corruption in the materia— the mass of propertied individuals— to which the constitution, traditional and bal­ anced, ultimately gave form. N ew modes of corruption had become threatening, but the militia, like the frequent elections of parliament which were beginning to be demanded, could be seen as a means to the reactivation of virtue. W hatever brought government face to face with the mass of propertied individuals could be said ridurre ai principii. The third circumstance mentioned earlier as crucial to the Harring­ tonian revival of 1675 was its taking place in the context of the con­ tinued existence of the House of Lords— and, as regards Shaftesbury’s oration, in the physical setting of the house itself. Harrington, it will be recalled, had assumed that the peerage had ceased to be a feudal aristocracy; that England must now be governed as a republic in which the role of the few was no longer played b y those on whom the many were dependent, or b y any class exercising a hereditary right to powers denied others, but by an aristocracy of talent and function, chosen in rapid rotation b y their fellow citizens for their conspicuous leisure and experience, and exercising only the power of debate— or proposing courses of action— rigorously separated from that of result, or choosing among the courses proposed. This carefully specified definition of “ natural aristocracy” (as it was to be called) long remained authori­ tative. The debate in Richard Crom well’s parliament, as w e have seen, turned on the proposed establishment of an entrenched if not heredi­ tary aristocracy of Cromwellians (not to mention contemporaneous proposals by Vane, Milton, and others for an aristocracy of saints), but produced a backlash of opinion in favor of the old peerage, on the grounds both that their authority in parliament was part of the tradi­ tional constitution and that it discharged the intermediary and balanc­ ing function ascribed to it b y the A nsw er to the Nineteen Propositions. Harrington himself remained convinced that since the lords could not be restored as a feudal baronage, there was no place for them in the existing distribution of property; and indeed it remains unclear whether, in the era following 1660, they exercised a social power com­

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mensurate with their constitutional functions. But we have now to speak of a period in which a hereditary but not feudal aristocracy was paradoxically defended as part of the apparatus of a constitution viewed in neo-Harringtonian terms. T o his fellow peers in October 1675, Shaftesbury declared: M y Lords, ’tis not only your Interest, but the interest of the Nation, that you maintain your Rights; for let the House o f Com ­ mons, and G en try o f England, think what they please, there is no Prince that ever G overn ed without N obility or an A rm y. If you will not have one, you must have t’other, or the M onarchy cannot long support, or keep itself from tumbling into a Democraticall Republique. Your Lordships and the People have the same cause, and the same Enemies. M y Lords, would you be in favour with the King? ’T is a very ill w ay to it, to put yourselves out of a future capacity, to be considerable in his Service. . . .32 The language is unmistakably Harringtonian, being a direct allusion to that passage in Oceana33 where it is explained that the decay of feudal aristocracy brought about the Civil W ar— the king, because he could no longer depend on the peers to keep the people in subjection, being forced to attempt military government, since “ a monarchy divested of its nobility hath no refuge under heaven but an arm y” -— and yet the sense is strangely reversed. The lords are not presented as the people’s feudal superiors, and it is in the latter’s interest that they stand between them and military rule. The danger of government by an arm y is not the consequence— as it had been for Harrington— of the peerage’s collapse, but is a conspiracy promoted b y the enemies of peerage, people, and even king; these enemies, then, are w orking against the traditional mixed constitution and are obviously promoting the new corruption and the new standing army. W e find similar thoughts expressed in the contemporaneous Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the C ou n try: it must be a great mistake in Counsels, or worse, that there should be so much pains taken b y the Court to debase and bring low the House of Peers, if a M ilitary Governm ent be not intended b y some. F or the power of Peerage and a Standing-Arm y are like two Buck­ ets, the proportion that one goes down, the other exactly goes up, and I refer you to the consideration of all the Histories of ours, or any of our neighbour Northern Monarchies, whether standing forces, M ilitary, and A rbitrary Government came not plainly in by 32 State Tracts . . An the Reign of Charles / / . . . , p. 59. 33 Toland, p. 65. 4*5

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the same steps, that the N obility were lessened; and whether, when­ ever they were in Pow er and Greatness, they permitted the least shadow of any of them. . . ,34 The same shift in emphasis, from historical to normative, is evident here. T o Harrington the point had been that once the nobility lost their feudal power the people were free, and the king could govern them only by military coercion— an enterprise in which he would probably fail for want of soldiers. T o the men of 1675 the nobility are the historical precursors of standing-army rule, but they are also the sole guarantee against it; and since it has been established upon the ruins of their power in all “ neighbour Northern Monarchies,” the need is all the greater to preserve the nobility in England. But the nobility’s greatness and the people’s freedom are not antithetical, as they had been for Harrington; they are inseparable, and the House of Lords is a necessary part of that mixed constitution of which the A nsw er to the N ineteen Propositions had spoken and whose existence Harrington had denied, condemning it as Gothic instability and “ modern pru­ dence.” The word “ N orthern,” as here used, is moreover a common synonym for “ G othic” — the Germanic invaders, or “ Goths,” were held to have come from the Scandinavian north, that ofpcina gentium— and “ G othic” government is presented as a mode of rule, once wide­ spread but now surviving only in England, the opposite of “ M ilitary and A rbitrary Governm ent,” and capable of existing only where a nobility has not given place to its necessary antithesis the standing army. The House of Lords, frequent parliaments, and the militia are being enlisted on the same side, that of the mixed and ancient constitu­ tion, whose enemy is something Harrington never thought of, the cor­ ruption of parliament b y patronage and military professionalization, and the militia, to Harrington a new and revolutionary force, is being made ancient, Gothic, and compatible with a hereditary aristocracy— all things he had denied it could ever have been. W hat is called the neo-Harringtonian interpretation, then, involved a complete reversal of the historical order found in Harrington’s own account of English government, the reconciliation of his norms— the relation of citizenship to arms and of arms to land— with the A nsw er to the N ineteen Propositions and the Ancient Constitution. Harringtonian freedom was made to exist in the Gothic and English past instead of being founded on its ruins. This reversal of time-sequence was the necessary consequence of two things: the decision to accept a world in which Crown and peerage had retained both existence and legiti34 State Tracts . . .in the Reign of Charles 11. . . , p. 55. 416

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m acy, and the gathering belief that the Court’s reviving powers of patronage and military employment presented the main threat to the country’s parliamentary independence. Corruption had not been a prominent term in Harrington’s vocabulary;35 he had been interested mainly in emancipation from dependence in its feudal form ; but the republican and Machiavellian language of which he was the chief E ng­ lish exponent was the appropriate vehicle for expounding a theory of corruption, and we are seeing something of the reasons w h y Shaftes­ bury and the country thinkers of the 1670s found such a theory attrac­ tive. A close friend of Harrington’s, who survived him for many years,36 was now at w ork upon a restatement of his theory, intended to supply a historical context for the transition from old feudalism to modern corruption. H enry N eville had been close enough to the author of Oceana to make Thomas Hobbes suspect he had taken part in its composition,37 and had been an active member of the republican rearguard in 1659. During the debates in Richard Crom well’s parliament he had heard, and opposed, much argument designed to present the traditional peer­ age as part of the liberty of the Ancient Constitution, but only twenty years later did he employ doctrine of this kind for his own purposes. His Plato R edivivu s, a political dialogue published in 1680, accepts the premise that the present troubles of England are due to the decay of the Ancient Constitution,38 which cannot therefore have been the anarchic wrestling-match which it had appeared during the Inter­ regnum. He affirms, however, that it was founded upon the feudal ascendancy of the peerage, and that its decay is the result o f a shift in the balance of property which has emancipated the commons from their control. But if the feudal period was one of constitutional free­ dom, not of oscillation between anarchy and absolute monarchy, some­ thing must be said of the position of the non-noble subject during all that time. T h e year 1680 was one in which the antiquity of the House of Commons, denied in the posthumously republished works of Filmer, had been angrily affirmed b y the W hig writers Petyt and Atw ood, and 35 Toland, p. 68. 36 Harrington died in 1677, having apparently been incapacitated for a con­ siderable time. Neville lived until 1694. For as much biographical information as is available on the latter, see Caroline Robbins’s introduction, pp. 5-20, to her T w o English Republican Tracts (Cambridge University Press, 1969), in which the full text of Plato Redivivus is given; and my “James Harrington and the Good Old Cause,” for his role in the 1659 debates. 37 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (London: Seeker and W arburg), p. 124. 38 Robbins, Republican Tracts, pp. 76, 81-82, 132-35, 144-50. 4*7

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was now in process of refutation b y the adepts of feudal scholarship headed by Robert B rad y.39 N eville, from his own Harringtonian or neo-Harringtonian perspective, is ambivalent on this score. On the one hand he writes (very much in his manner of 1659): In our ancestors’ times, most of the members of our house of com­ mons thought it an honour to retain to some great lord, and to wear his blue coat: and when they had made up their lord’s train, and waited upon him from his own house to the lords’ house, and made a lane for him to enter, and departed to sit themselves in the lower house of parliament, as it was then (and very justly) called; can you think that anything could pass in such a parliament, that was not ordered b y the lords?40 But a few pages earlier we read: And I must confess I was inclined to believe, that before that time [i.e., the reign of H enry III], our yeom anry or commonalty had not form ally assembled in parliament, but been virtually included and represented by the peers, upon whom they depended: but I am fully convinced that it was otherwise, by the learned discourses lately published by M r Petyt of the Tem ple, and M r Atw ood of G raysInn; being gentlemen whom I mention, honoris causa.41 Neville had to maintain the antiquity of the commons, both because a T o r y counterattack was denying it in order to show that all liberties were of the king’s gift, and in order to uphold his neo-Harringtonian position that the ascendancy of the baronage had been part of a regime of ancient freedom which must be reformed and preserved. But his closeness to Harrington underlines the paradoxical role he was now playing. The revolutionary of 1656, insisting that there had been no liberty until the commons were free of lords and king alike, was in reality closer to the T o r y Brady, who argued on the same grounds that the commons had had no liberty until the king had given it to them; and N eville’s attempt to make Harringtonian liberty seem ancient would have been better argued if he could have joined Atw ood and Algernon Sidney in scouting the element of vassalage in feudal society and contending that words like baro had applied to all freemen, noble and non-noble alike.42 But his equivocation left him on stronger ground when he sought to argue that the decay of baronage had been 39 Ancient Constitution, pp. 187-95. 40 Republican Tracts, p. 134. 41 Ibid., p. 120. 42 Atwood argued this case at length in Jus Anglorum ab Antiquo (1681) and The Lord Holies his Remains (1682). Sidney, Discourses on Government (3d ed., London, 1751), p. 387. 418

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part of the decay of the Ancient Constitution. W hen the king had had only the barons to deal with, they had brought the commons into line for him; but as their power had decayed, he had been confronted by an increasingly independent landowning commonalty over whom he had no means of influence, and the House of Lords was therefore fail­ ing— this at least survived from the Harringtonian interpretation proper— to act as that pouvoir interm ediate which the theory of mixed government prescribed that they should be.43 N eville had no intention of restoring them to that role; he proposed setting up a series of coun­ cils in which king and parliament should administer the executive power jointly; but it is clear from his treatment that a nobility deprived of feudal power, but retaining a hereditary right o f summons, might continue to act as titular and honorary leaders of a landowning class from which nothing now differentiated them— as Giannotti might have put it, all were now m ediocri. His essential contention, however, is that the decay of the baronage has left the royal executive and its preroga­ tives face to face with a parliamentary commonalty over whom it has no control; and until a constitutional solution, like that he is concerned to propose, has redistributed power, the relations of Crown and com­ mons are doomed to instability. In the deadlocks which arise, cunning but incompetent ministers and courtiers will gull the king with ingen­ ious proposals, whose effect if carried out might well be to corrupt the people; but N eville, more sanguine than Shaftesbury or Marvell, considers these devices likely to fail.44 In particular, his Harringtonian training and his N e w Model memories combine to make him think that no standing arm y capable of enforcing the royal power can be recruited from the English commonalty.45 But if N eville himself has no highly developed theory o f corruption, he has provided the histori­ cal context in which one might be situated. It could now be argued that corruption was a necessary expedient to which kings had been driven b y the decay of baronial power over the people; the history of peerage might, at the cost of some inconsistency, be assimilated to the m yth of a constitution both ancient and uncorrupted; and if a militia of freemen, independent in arms and in tenure, could be made part of that myth, the new phenomenon of m ilitary bureaucracy would fit into place as its corrupting opposite. T he formal restatement of Harringtonian doctrine, in what w e have referred to as its neo-Harringtonian form, was now complete. Its two essential characteristics were the acceptance of a House of Lords which was not a feudal baronage and was no longer condemned as an entrenched aristocracy, but might be thought o f as an almost natural 43 Republican Tracts, pp. 135, 145-48. 45 Ibid., p. 180.

44 Ibid., pp. 178-82, 198-200. 419

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intermediary between Crown and commons,46 and the relegation to the past of that commonwealth of armed proprietors which Harring­ ton had located in the present. T o N eville, Harrington’s friend and literary heir apparent, whose experience of the doctrine in action had begun in 1659, it m ay well have seemed necessary to restate it if its essentials were to survive under the restored Ancient Constitution; and to those in the Shaftesbury circle, as well as Marvell and Neville, who now saw patronage, placemen, and standing army as the chief threat to the political order, an equation of the historic structure of parlia­ ment with the classical (as well as historical) militia may have seemed what was chiefly required. But the consequences of reversing the Harringtonian sequence were of moment. T he political norm now lay in the past, and the movement of history, which Harrington had seen as a rinnovazione, resumed its common pattern of decline. The motive of the neo-Harringtonians was to denounce corruption; they paid the price of obliging themselves to regard all change as corruption (we recall that they had denied themselves recourse to a millennium). Fu r­ thermore, that which was exposed to corruption and degeneration was now the Ancient Constitution, and this must accordingly be envisaged in the form of a balance (as since 1642 it had been normal to do). But since the crucial disturbance was no longer that taking place in the relation of lords to commons, the balance being disturbed might better be seen as one of powers rather than estates; it was the executive that threatened to encroach upon the legislature, and the problem of patron­ age led to a century and more of debate concerning the separation and interdependence of the powers of the constitution. T o qualify as cor­ ruption, however, the encroachments of the executive must be seen as more than an infringement of the sphere of legislative action. T h ey must be seen as tending to bring the individual members, as well as the corporate body, of the legislature into dependence upon the executive, a dependence which must be termed corruption since it existed where independence should obtain. T he importation of the classical concept of corruption necessitated considerable restatement of a theory of the English constitution itself little known before T he K ing's A nsw er to the N ineteen Propositions. That an ideology so founded received so rapidly such widespread acceptance indicates the importance which the issues raised b y Shaftesbury’s attack on Danby possessed for the English political public. N o important response to Plato Redivivus appeared from the T o r y side,47 a fact which indicates the ideological confusion of the last years 46 Ibid., pp. 192-94. 47 W . W ., Antidotum Britannicum, and Thomas Goddard, Plato’s Demon, nei­ ther of much significance, appeared in 1682. 420

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of Charles II’s reign. In 1675, when the neo-Harringtonian attack began, the publication of a w ork of feudal scholarship had fired the train which led to the Brady controversy. In 1679, the republication of the posthumous works of Filmer had had three consequences: the beginnings of the composition of Lock e’s Treatises on G overnm ent, of T y rre ll’s Patriarcha non M o n a rc h a l and of other works which argued for consensual authority against the patriarchal thesis; the con­ tinuation b y Petyt and Atw ood of the antifeudal polemic begun in 1675, now intended as a riposte to those of Film er’s works which denied the antiquity o f the commons, and the counterattack of Brady and his allies; and the apparently independent composition b y Algernon Sidney of those Discourses on G overnm ent which were to contribute to his death in 1683. Plato R edivivus, essentially a continuation of the neo-Harringtonian polemic o f 1675, was caught up in the battle between Petyt and Brady through N eville’s decision to accept the form er’s thesis concerning the House of Commons, and the T o r y writers took notice of it only on that score. Brady and his friends were old R o yal­ ists rather than new Tories, interested in the defense of prerogative and hereditary succession rather than of patronage and standing armies, and they made no response to N eville’s theses linking the decline of feudalism to the rise of patronage. In the next generation, however, such a response developed, and took the form of a blunt assertion that since feudalism had declined patronage was indeed necessary, and not corrupting.49 Such a version of history might have been arrived at by quoting Harrington against the neo-Harringtonians, but more usually rested upon an acceptance o f Brad y’s theses concerning the feudal past. In the changing patterns of Revolution politics, this argument came to serve the interests of the W higs, and W hig bishops were carrying on the w ork of Spelman and Brady b y 1698.50 D ow n to 1688, while the W higs were still a near-rebellious opposi­ tion, the statement o f the neo-Harringtonian polemic o f Country against Court had to coexist with the more pressing need to repudiate Filmer, hold out against the last offensive of the old prerogative and nonresistant school, and finally to justify the Revolution. Generally speaking, these were not operations best conducted in semi-republican or neo-Harringtonian terms, though it is important to bear in mind 48 The complicated story of Locke’s and T yrrell’s writings at this time is pur­ sued by Peter Laslett in the introduction to his edition of Locke’s Tw o Treatises (Cambridge University Press, i960 and 1963), ch. 111. 49 See below, pp. 481-82, 494-95. 50 Edmund Gibson, later Bishop of London, completed editing Spelman’s works in 1698 (Ancient Constitution, p. 243). See G . V . Bennett, White Kennety 16601728: Bishop of Peterborough (London: S.P.C.K., 1957).

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that Sidney’s Discourses, a voice from the past, recalling the Good Old Cause of the fifties and even the Tacitism of an earlier generation still, condemn absolute m onarchy for corrupting the subject and equate virtue with a fram ework of mixed government so austerely defined as to be virtually an aristocratic republic.51 Canonized for the next cen­ tury b y their author’s martyrdom, they were not published until the crucial year 1698, b y which time, paradoxically enough, they appeared less anachronistic than they might have fifteen years earlier. T he polemic against patronage and corruption was an attack upon modern government, that against prerogative and patriarchalism was an attempt to bury the past; yet it was the form er that entailed the language of classical republicanism, the latter that enlisted the services of Locke. The amalgam which was W hig ideology in the eighties disintegrated during the decade follow ing the Revolution;52 and the neo-Harringtonian thesis became an instrument of radical reaction in an era of devastating economic change. 51 Discourses, 11, sections 11-30; in, sections 1-10. 52 Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), chs. 11 and in in particular. See the Advertisement to vol. 11 of A Collection of State Tracts Published on Occasion of the Late Revolution in 1688 and during the Reign of K ing William 111 (London, 1706), for comment on the disruption of W hig solidarity as revealed in pamphlets.

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N E O -M A C H IA V ELLIA N PO LITICAL ECONOM Y The Augustan Debate over Land, Trade and Credit

[i] h a l f - c e n t u r y f o l l o w i n g the Revolution of 1688 is a period till recently little studied, but nevertheless of great importance, in the history of English political thought— not least because, strictly speak­ ing, it witnesses the latter’s transformation from “ English” to “ British” in the year 1707. Between the Englishman John Locke at the beginning of the period so designated, and the Scot David Hume commencing his w ork as it closed, no political theorist or philosopher to be ranked among the giants emerged in Anglophone culture; and yet the period was one of change and development in some w ays more radical and significant even than those of the Civil W ar and Interregnum. Spe­ cifically it can be shown that this was the era in which political thought became engrossed with the conscious recognition of change in the eco­ nomic and social foundations of politics and the political personality, so that the zdon politikon took on his modern character of participant observer in processes of material and historical change fundamentally affecting his nature; and it can be shown that these changes in percep­ tion came about through the development of a neo-Machiavellian, as well as neo-Harringtonian, style in the theory of political economy, in response to England’s emergence as Britain, a major commercial, mili­ tary, and imperial power. The processes observed, and the changes in language consequent upon the observation, were in a material and secular sense more revolutionary than anything to be detected in the generation of radical Puritanism; and among the phenomena will be found the appearance of Machiavellian thought as a criticism of modernity. In studying this development in the history of thought, we shall allot a crucial role to neither the justification of the Revolution of 1688 itself, nor the political writings of Locke. The deposition of James II could of its nature give rise to little more than a reexamination of the condi­ tionality of political authority, which in the Machiavellian tradition had always appeared as a feature of the contingent world, and a counter­

the

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vailing emphasis upon the relation of tradition and custom to consent;1 nor did James— possibly the most unsubtle figure in the history of English political interpretation— ever appear as one of those archetypes of corruption, like Shaftesbury’s Danby or Bolingbroke’s W alpole, out of whom the m ythology of English neo-Machiavellism was to be built. As for Locke, it has to be admitted that the present is an unfortunate moment for including him in syntheses. Am ong the revolutionary effects of the reevaluation of his historical role initiated b y Laslett and continued by Dunn2 has been a shattering demolition of his myth: not that he was other than a great and authoritative thinker, but that his greatness and authority have been w ildly distorted by a habit of taking them unhistorically for granted. Since he was no kind of classical or Machiavellian republican, he does not contribute directly to the for­ mation of the tradition we are to study; it seems possible rather to allot him a place, and debate its magnitude, among that tradition’s adversaries.3 But the deemphasizing of Locke is for the present a tacti­ cal necessity. The historical context must be reconstructed without him before he can be fitted back into it. T h e acceptance of W illiam III as king proved to mean something not fully foreseen or desired by those who invited him over: the com­ mitment of England— of English troops and money— to a sequence of major continental wars. This involved a quasi-permanent enlargement of that standing arm y whose sinister role in the public imagination of the seventies had lost nothing in the days of James II and the persecu­ tion of the Huguenots; and in addition, b y the end of the Nine Years W ar of 1688-1697 (K in g W illiam ’s W ar in the notation of American historiography), two further massive consequences had made their w ay to recognition. The maritime losses of this war, undertaken in alliance with the Dutch, had made explicit certain facts of the era of the Dutch W ars now ending: that England was now a trading nation— something which Scotland desperately longed to become— and that according to 1 This conclusion emerges from a study of the overall character of the State Tracts . . . on occasion of the Late Revolution (see above, ch. xii, n. 52), 1 (1705). There is one neo-Harringtonian analysis of the fall of James II: Some Remarks upon Government, and Particularly upon the Establishment of the English M on­ archy, Relating to this Present Juncture, signed N . T . (pp. 149-62); its tone is consciously extra-moral and “ Machiavellian.” 2 John Dunn, The Political Thought of Joh?1 Locke: A n Historical Account of the Argument of the Tw o Treatises of Government (Cambridge University Press, 1969), and “The Politics of Locke in England and America in the Eighteenth Cen­ tury,” in John W . Yolton (ed.), John Locke: Problems and Perspectives (Cam­ bridge University Press, 1969), pp. 45-80. 3 See Isaac F. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the A ge of Walpole (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 61-63.

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the assumptions of the age, commerce was an aggressive action, an acquisition to the trading society’s self of something which might have been acquired b y another, an end to which war might or might not be an appropriate means. It was a further aspect of this perception that something called national prosperity was an intelligible field of study, and that there existed an art called “ political arithmetic,” a quantitative means of estimating every individual’s contribution to the political good by measuring what he put into or withdrew from the national stock.4 A t a very rapid pace, an entity known as Trade entered the language of politics, and became something which no orator, pamphlet­ eer, or theorist could afford to neglect and which, in an era o f war, was intimately connected with the concepts of external relations and national power. But the second consequence of England’s involvement in major war was perceived in terms more far-reaching still. In what has been called the “ financial revolution” 5 that began in the nineties, means were found of associating the national prosperity directly with the stability of the regime, the expanding activities of government and— most significant of these— the prosecution of war. The institutions of the new finance, of which the Bank of England and the National Debt came to be the most important, were essentially a series of devices for encouraging the large or small investor to lend capital to the state, investing in its future political stability and strengthening this by the act of investment itself, while deriving a guaranteed income from the return on the sum invested. W ith the aid of the invested capital, the state was able to maintain larger and more permanent armies and bureaucracies— inci­ dentally increasing the resources at the disposal of political patronage— and as long as its affairs visibly prospered, it was able to attract further investments and conduct larger and longer wars. T he era of the condottiere— the short-term military contractor— ended, his place being taken b y the military administrator as one arm of the bureaucratic state. But as the volume of investment increased, tw o further consequences followed. Th e state felt able to accept more credit, and conduct greater activities, than could be paid for b y the existing volume of capital, and it guaranteed the repayment of loans on the security of revenues to be collected, and investments to be made, in the future; the National Debt 4 T h e foun der o f this art w as held to be Sir W illia m P etty. See E . Strauss, Sir William Petty: Portrait of a Genius (Lon d on : T h e B o d ley H ead, 19 54 ), and W i l ­ liam L etw in , The Origins of Scientific Economics (N e w Y o rk : D ou bleday A n c h o r Books, 19 6 5). 5 P .G .M . D ickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Devel­ opment of Public Credit, 1688-1756 (Lon don : M acm illan, 19 6 7 ); Dennis Rubini, “ Politics and the Battle fo r the Banks, 1688-16 9 7,” English Historical Review 85 ( I9 7°)» 6 9 3-714 .

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had been born and entailed upon posterity. It was noted that this did not save w ar from being paid for b y a rapidly increasing land tax which, unlike those in previous generations, was efficiently collected; the state was too strong and too heavily legitimated to be defied by the non­ payment of the early Stuart period. Secondly, the volume of invest­ ment meant that the shares, tickets, or tallies entitling the possessor to a share of repayment from the public funds became marketable prop­ erty, whose value rose and fell as public confidence in the state’s politi­ cal, military, and financial transactions waxed and waned. The fund­ holder and the stockjobber, the bull and the bear, had come upon the stage; and the figure around which they were grouped, the concept which they introduced into the language of English politics, was not Trade but Credit. The rapidly developing style of political economy, which is the dominant mode of Augustan political thought, took shape around the varying relationships which publicists were prepared to allow between land, trade, and credit as sources not m erely of public wealth, but of political stability and virtue. The stress laid upon the last-named is so great that we have to recognize that the first chapter in the history of political economy is also a further chapter in the continuing history of civic humanism; and the Augustan debate derives its Harringtonian and Machiavellian character from the circumstance that the critics of the new finance denounced it as a continuation of that alliance between patronage and militarism, corruption and the standing army, which had figured in the debate of 1675 anc* had already become so far a staple of political polemic that the defenders of the new order were obliged to accept many of its postulates and assumptions. Debate along these lines reaches a series of peaks during the Augustan half-century: first in the “ standing arm y controversy” or “ paper w ar” of approxi­ mately 1698-1702,6 in which John Toland, John Trenchard, W alter M oyle, Andrew Fletcher, and Charles Davenant wrote for the Coun­ try party and Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Sw ift for the Court; second, during the “ four last years” of Queen Anne, when Sw ift for the Tories was opposed b y the W higs Addison and— with some changes of front— D efoe;7 thirdly, during the storms of the South Sea crisis, domi6 See Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, pp. 103-105; Frank H. Ellis, introduction to his edition of Swift, A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967); W . T . Laprade, Public Opinion and Politics in Eighteenth-Century England to the Fall of Walpole (New York: Macmillan, 1936). 7 Michael Foot, The Pen and the Sw ord (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1957); Richard I. Cook, Jonathan Sw ift as a T ory Pamphleteer (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1967); James O. Richards, Party Propaganda 4 26

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nated in the field of journalism b y John Trenchard and Thomas G o r­ don, conducting Cato's Letters and T h e Independent W h ig; and lastly, between 1726 and 1734, when Bolingbroke attempted to destroy W al­ pole b y a journalistic campaign in T h e Craftsman, supported b y most of the great writers of the age and countered b y T he London Journal and Lord H ervey.8 The main lines of argument in all these debates are strikingly consistent, to the point where, with Defoe in 1698 and the Walpolean writers thirty-five years later, one can see the lineaments of a “ Court” theory of economics, politics, and history, constructed to meet the challenge of what has become known as the “ Country” ideol­ ogy. B y the end o f the period the w ay was clear for the great summa­ tions of the controversy written b y Montesquieu and Hume at mid­ century; and the ideological stage was not significantly altered until the era of the French Revolution. The “ paper w ar” of the last years of W illiam I l l ’s reign is also known as the “ standing arm y controversy,” 9 because it turned largely on the Country party’s desire to reduce the king’s English and foreign forces immediately after the peace treaty of 1697; but it also involved issues of corruption in at least three senses of the term, varying from ancient to very new. Courtiers, including both foreigners and women, were found to have received excessively large grants of Irish land; there was a recrudescent desire to exclude placemen from the House of Com­ mons; and, most innovatory of all, there were the beginnings of what became a very widespread denunciation o f the “ corruption” of parlia­ ment and society b y fundholders and stockjobbers, rentiers living off their share (however acquired) of the public debts. Th e conjunction of eulogy of the militia with jeremiads against corruption b y the execu­ tive, with which we are already familiar, developed into a new analysis of the relation of war and commerce to virtue, and into a new contro­ versy concerning the course of English and European history, which with its underlying ambiguities reveals the neo-Machiavellian character of thought about and in the new age. Its study can best be initiated by exploring the writings of A ndrew Fletcher, Charles Davenant, and Daniel Defoe. Fletcher10 was a Scot, one of the first o f a long line of percipient under Queen Anne: the General Elections of 1702-13 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972). 8 Kramnick, op.cit. 9 Lois F. Schwoerer, “The Literature of the Standing Arm y Controversy,” Huntington Library Quarterly 28, no. 3 (1964-65), 187-212; Dennis Rubini, Court and Country, 1688-1702 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1967). 10 Robbins, Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, pp. 9-10, 180-84. His Political Works were published in 1732 and repeatedly thereafter. See also Lord

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N orth Britons who understood the language of English controversy better, in some respects, than the English themselves. He had been out with Monmouth in 1685, but had left Somerset hurriedly after shoot­ ing a Taunton notable in a quarrel over a horse. The impression of archaic truculence which this detail may leave is misleading; the man was a patriot ideologue of high intellectual attainments, who would have made an admirable contemporary of Patrick H enry and Richard H. Lee. In the Discourse o f G overnm ent with Relation to Militias, he developed the neo-Harringtonian version of history further than any­ one had yet carried it, and significantly revealed its latent ambivalences. He argues that from a .d . 400 to 1500 the Gothic mode of government had guaranteed liberty to Europe b y keeping the sword in the hands of the landholding subject. The barons had held of the kings and the vassals of the barons, and when this was done, there was no longer any Standing A rm y kept on foot, but every man went to live upon his own Lands; and when the Defence of the Country required an A rm y, the K in g summoned the Barons to his Standard, who came attended with their Vassals. Thus were the Armies o f Europe composed for about eleven hun­ dred years; and this Constitution of Government put the Sword into the hands o f the Subject, because the Vassals depended more immedi­ ately on the Barons than on the King, which effectually secured the freedom of those Governments. For the Barons could not make use of their Pow er to destroy those limited Monarchies, without destroy­ ing their own Grandeur; nor could the K ing invade their Privileges, having no other Forces than the Vassals of his own Demeasnes to rely upon for his support in such an Attempt. I lay no great stress on any other Limitations of those Monarchies; nor do I think any so essential to the Liberties of the People, as that which placed the Sword in the hands of the Subject. . . . I do not deny that these limited Monarchies during the greatness of the Barons, had some Defects: I know few Governments free from them. But after all, there was a Balance that kept those G overn­ ments steady, and an effectual Provision against the Encroachments of the Crow n.11 B y this typically W hig slurring over of the dependence of tenant upon lord, Fletcher had once more eliminated Harrington’s sharp disBuchan, Essays on the Lives and Writings of Fletcher of Saltowi and the Poet Thomson (London, 1792). 1 1 A Discourse of Government with Relation to Militias (Edinburgh, 1698), pp.

7-9-

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tincticn between “ ancient prudence” and “ ancient constitution,” and had located the balanced commonwealth of armed freemen in the era of “ modern prudence” which, with its apparatus of king, lords, and com­ mons, Harrington had dismissed as an ill-regulated disequilibrium. Feudal tenure now became a means to balance, because it ensured an equilibrium between king and barons, and to liberty and equality, because it made the commoner-vassals contributors to that balance. Unlike H arrington’s vassal, whose land and sword were his master’s, Fletcher seems to have seen his vassal— who was after all a Scot— as intractable upon his own plot of ground, helping to keep the sword where it belonged, in the hands of the proprietors of land. T h e barons of 1215, or any other date, could be shown defending the principles of ancient balance, virtii and liberty, even as they defended their feudal privileges. But this state of affairs had gone and could not be restored. “ About the year 1500,” there had occurred an “ Alteration of Governm ent . . . in most Countries of Europe,” which had left nothing of the old con­ stitutions but “ the ancient Term s and outward Form s,” so that “ the generality of all Ranks of Men are cheated by W ords and Names.” 12 Harrington had assigned the same dating to the end of feudal tenures, but had seen this as a liberating process, initiated by conscious action even if its author, H enry V II, had not understood the power he was setting loose. It had been essentially legal action which emancipated the vassals from military service, though broader social consequences had ensued when the lords took to lives of conspicuous expenditure at court and the liberated “ industry” of the people had seized upon the abbey lands sold them b y H enry V III. T o Fletcher, the process was unintended,13 far more broadly social in its origins and profoundly ambivalent in its consequences. I shall deduce from their Original, the Causes, Occasions, and the Complication of those many unforeseen Accidents; which falling out much about the same time, produced so great a Change. And it will at first sight seem very strange, when I shall name the Restoration of Learning, the Invention of Printing, of the Needle and of G un­ powder, as the chief of them; things in themselves so excellent, and which, the last only excepted, might have proved of infinite Advantage to the W orld, if their remote Influence upon Govern12 Discourse, p. 5. 13 Discourse, p. 6: “ And ’tis worth observation, that tho this Change was fatal to their Liberty, yet it was not introduced by the Contrivance of ill-designing Men; nor were the mischievous Consequences perceived, unless perhaps by a few wise Men, who, if they saw' it, wanted Power to prevent it.” 429

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ment had been obviated by suitable Remedies. Such odd Conse­ quences, and of such a different Nature, accompany extraordinary Inventions of any kind.14 Innovation, we observe, is retaining its dangerous and unpredictable character; but, unlike Machiavelli’s concern for the effects upon men of stripping them of a fram ework of custom, Fletcher’s attention is di­ rected toward causation, toward the long-term effects of action in the complex web of human society. O f the innovations he names, the restoration of learning and the invention of printing made the diversi­ ties of culture available to previously “ Gothic” Europeans, and the invention of the compass opened up a world trade. The significance of gunpowder has yet to emerge. B y this means the Lu xury of Asia and America was added to that of the Antients; and all Ages, and all Countries concurred to sink Europe into an Abyss of Pleasures; which were rendred the more expensive b y a perpetual Change of the Fashions in Clothes, Equip­ age and Furniture of Houses. These things brought a total Alteration in the w ay of living, upon which all Government depends. ’Tis true, K now ledg being mightily increased, and a great Curiosity and N icety in every thing intro­ duced, Men imagined themselves to be gainers in all points, b y chang­ ing from their frugal and military w ay of living, which I must con­ fess had some mixture of Rudeness and Ignorance in it, tho not inseparable from it. But at the same time they did not consider the unspeakable Evils that are altogether inseparable from an expensive w ay of living.15 T he danger of luxury, we soon learn, is not that it produces effemi­ nacy of taste or even mutability of fashion, so much as that it leads to choice and consequently to specialization. The Gothic warrior had nothing much to do but till his soil, bear his arms, and assert his free­ dom; the refined man of the Renaissance might pursue knowledge or luxury, pleasure or fashion, and so lost interest in defending himself. If he was a lord, he got into debt and commuted his vassals’ services for rents; if he was a commoner, he was content to be a tenant instead of a vassal. T he kings meanwhile found their subjects willing to pay them a revenue out of which to hire mercenaries to defend them; and the invention of gunpowder, turning wars into long and expensive sieges, intensified this process as soon as it had begun. Once armies were paid for b y taxes, taxes were collected b y armies and the liberties of nearly all Europe were at an end.16 But rule b y professional soldiers

14 Discourse,

pp. 9-10. 15 Discourse, pp. 12-13. 430

16 Discourse, pp. 13-15.

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came about only because the subject was able to exercise choice, to prefer alternatives to bearing arms himself. W hat he did not like, he could pay another to do for him; what he alienated as he bought this immunity, he did not find out until the step was irreversible. “ L u xu ry,” then, is shorthand for culture, leisure, and choice; these goods carry their concomitant ill. T he most Fletcher can suggest is that rudeness and ignorance are not inseparable from warrior freedom, meaning pre­ sumably that the primitive freeman was still educable; but “ an expen­ sive w ay of living,” in which he sells the means of freedom to buy the materials of culture, is inseparable from corruption. Fletcher has elaborated the neo-Harringtonian perspective to the point where it exposed the most difficult of the many problems to per­ plex eighteenth-century social thought: the apparent incompatibility of liberty and virtue with culture, which, more than commerce itself, opened up the problem of the diversity of human satisfactions. The freeman must desire nothing more than freedom, nothing more than the public good to which he dedicated himself; once he could exchange his freedom for some other commodity, the act became no less cor­ rupting if that other commodity were knowledge itself. The humanist stress on arms and land as the preconditions of individual civic and moral autonomy had heightened the dilemma by presenting it in the form of an irreversible historical process. Virtue, in its paradigmatic social form, was now located in a past; but the era of freedom was also the era of barbarism and superstition, and the term “ G othic” might, with excruciating ambivalence, be applied in both senses. As for com­ merce, it was, so to speak, the active form of culture itself: if there were many satisfactions a man might choose between them, and if he assigned priorities, postponing a future satisfaction for the sake of a present one, he was already well on the w ay toward effecting exchanges. There was a morality for the Aristotelian citizen, joining in the determination of priorities; but if there was a morality for the trading man, exchanging one commodity for its equivalent value in another, that morality was conspicuously not linked to the virtue of the citizen— the only secular virtue yet known to W estern man— which still demanded of the individual an autonomy he could not alien­ ate without becoming corrupt. It would be w rong to suppose that Fletcher naively desired to restore an agrarian world of self-sufficient farming warriors; he wrote at length about the undeniably urgent problems of inducing some degree of commercial prosperity in the desperate society of Scotland;17 but his history of liberty, his “ discourse of government in its relation to militias,” reveals to us a condition of 17 See the “First” and “Second Discourses on the Affairs of Scotland” in his Political Works.

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thought about 1 700 in which a bourgeois ideology, a civic morality for market man, was ardently desired but apparently not to be found. This is w h y he goes on— as Toland did in his contemporaneous The Militia R efo rm ed 18— to describe a scheme of military training for all free­ holders, which is essentially a means of education in civic virtue.19 Men are no longer the barons and vassals of the Gothic world; they have choice, commerce, and the opportunity of corruption. T o render unnecessary the professional armies which will make corruption irre­ versible, they must form a militia; but this austere mode of service to the commonwealth will teach them, by actualizing it in arms, the fru­ gality, the surrender of private satisfactions— there is even an equiva­ lent to the militia sermons which had praised poverty in the Florence of 15 2 8 -15 3020— and in short the virtue, which the social order itself no longer guarantees. T o set up such a militia will be legislative, educative, and a ridurre ai principii; buone leggi, buona educazione, buone arme. Education, however, has begun its long career as a perceived mode of counteracting the course of social development. But the neo-Harringtonian version of English history was singularly liable to attack; with Brady or with Harrington himself on his desk, a critic might argue that the Gothic epoch had been one of such subjec­ tion of the commons to the lords that no balance or liberty had existed. Defoe, in his reply to Fletcher and Trenchard,21 argued as against the form er that about the time, when this Service b y Villenage and Vassalage began to be resented b y the People, and b y Peace and Trade they grew rich, and the Pow er of the Barons being too great, frequent Commo­ tions, Civil W ars, and Battels, were the Consequence, nay sometimes without concerning the K ing in the Quarrel: One Nobleman would Invade another, in which the weakest suffered most, and the poor Man's Blood was the Price o f all\ the People obtain’d Priviledges of their own, and oblig’d the K ing and the Barons to accept of an Equilibrium , this we call a Parliament: And from this the Due Bal18 State Tracts, 11, 594-614. 19 Discourse, pp. 50-62. 20 Discourse, p. 54. These are to be delivered by members of the militia itself, churchmen being excluded from the camp. Cf. p. 52: “Their Drink should be Water, sometimes tempered with a proportion of Brandy, and at other times with Vinegar.” 21 A n Argument Shewing that a Standing A rm y, with Consent of Parliament, Is N ot Inconsistent with a Free Government (1698); reprinted in J. T . Boulton (ed.), Daniel Defoe (N ew York: Schocken Books, 1965). This was in answer to John Trenchard and Walter Moyle, A n Argument Shewing that a Standing A rm y Is Inconsistent with a Free Government, and Absolutely Destructive to the Constitution of the English Monarchy (1697).

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lance, we have so much heard of is deduced. I need not lead m y Reader to the Tim es and Circumstances of this, but this Due Ballance is the Foundation on which we now stand . . . and I appeal to all Men to judge if this Ballance be not a much nobler Constitution in all its Points, than the old G othick Model of Government. . . ,22 But ’tis said, the Barons grow ing poor by the Luxury o f the Tim es, and the Comm on People grow ing rich, they exchang'd their Vassal­ age fo r Leases, Rents, Fines, and the like. T h ey did so, and so became entituled to the Service o f themselves; and so overthrew the Settle­ ment, and from hence came a House o f Comm ons: And I hope En g­ land has reason to value the Alteration. Let them that think not reflect on the Freedoms the Commons enjoy in Poland, where the G othick Institution remains, and they w ill be satisfied.23 Liberty and balanced government were modern, not ancient, and based upon an emancipation of the commons from feudal control, dated about where Harrington had located it in time. In his verse satire of two years later, T h e T rue-Born Englishman, Defoe made the same point in language which might have been that of a Leveller fifty years before: T h e great Invading Norm an let us know W hat Conquerors in After-Tim es might do. . . . H e gave his Legions their Eternal Station And made them all Freeholders of the Nation. . . . T he Rascals thus enrich’d, he called them L ords, T o please their Upstart Pride with new-made W ords, And D oom sday-Book his T yran n y records. And here begins the Ancient Pedigree Th at so exalts our Poor N obility: ’T is that from some French Trooper they derive, W ho with the Norm an Bastard did arrive. . . . Conquest, as b y the Moderns ’tis exprest, M ay give a Title to the Lands possest: But that the Longest Sw ord shou’d be so Civil, T o make a Frenchman English, that’s the D evil.24 T o Lilburne or Harrington, however, such delegitimation of the past was a prelude to a millennial restoration of Saxon liberty or ancient prudence. D efoe’s expectations are neither restorationist nor apocalyp­ tic; he is a modern, writing to defend the Junto W higs, the Bank of 22 Boulton, pp. 44-45. 23 Boulton, p. 45. 24 The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr (170 1), lines 195-96, 205-206, 209-15, 229-32 (Boulton, pp. 59-60). 433

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England, and the standing army. He denies the antiquity of either liberty or virtue— as his successors were to deny that the constitution had any principles to return to— in the name of a balance discovered only tw o hundred years previously, and that by neither reason nor revelation. “ B y Peace and Trade they grew rich” ; it is, with Defoe no less than with Fletcher— but the value-signs have been reversed— the principle of commerce which put an end to the Gothic constitution. Defoe liked to address himself to trading men, but it is unduly naive merely to invoke the apparition of a trading bourgeoisie to provide him with an audience and motive for writing as he did. In the tract of 1698 he remarked: I propose to direct this Discourse to the Honest well meaning English-Freeholder, who has a share in the Terra firma, and there­ fore is concern’d to preserve Freedom; to the Inhabitant that loves his Liberty better than his Life, and w on’t sell it for M oney; and this is the Man who has the most reason to fear a Standing A rm y, for he has something to lose; as he is most concern’d for the Safety of a Ship, who has a Cargo on her Bottom.25 T h e language now might be that of Ireton at Putney, or Sw ift and Bolingbroke extolling the “ landed interest” in 1 7 1 1 or 1731. The most we can permit Defoe is the clear understanding that once land ceased to be valued in services, there must be trade and a circulation of money to permit of its being valued in “ leases, rents and the like” ; and to make land a source of rentals is not the same as to make it a marketable commodity. W hat he is arguing is that when revenue replaces services, the House of Commons can play its due role in a balanced constitution b y exercising the power of supply. In T he True-Born Englishman he launched a devastating blow at the neo-Harringtonian cult of the mili­ tia, with the couplet (referring to W illiam I, to whom W illiam III had been invidiously compared): N o Parliament his A rm y cou’d disband; H e rais’d no M on ey, fo r he paid in Land ;26 and the whole of his A rgum ent in 1698 was directed at showing that a professional arm y was easily controlled so long as parliament com­ manded the sources of its pay. But this did not of itself meet the Coun­ try objection that the very existence of a standing arm y corrupted parliament and lessened its ability to refuse supply, or that the power of m oney provided the executive with means of corruption unknown in former ages. Defoe conceded the point that the nature of war and government had changed: 25 Boulton, pp. 37-38.

26 Lines 203-204 (Boulton, p. 60). 434

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England now is in sundry Circumstances, different from England form erly, with respect to the Manner of Fighting, the Circumstances of our Neighbours, and of our Selves; and there are some Reasons w h y a Militia are not, and perhaps I might make it out cannot be made fit for the Uses of the present W ars.27 W hat he denied was that there was any need for a return to the pre­ commercial militia, or a precommercial morality such as Fletcher and Toland saw their militias as inculcating. But there is as yet no sign that his modernism involved a shift to any new conception of morality— only to a greater degree of liberty; and as long as that was the case, the emancipation of the commons might entail entry upon a world less morally stabilized than the Gothic world preceding it. Defoe might abuse the latter for its feudal bloodshed and disorder; but it could be defended in terms of an Aristotelian ethic of self-sufficiency and auton­ omy. If he could furnish no alternative ethic, the move to a commer­ cial polity might entail the search for a new form of Machiavellian virtii, but with all the Machiavellian categories at the service of those who would argue that such a virtii must be hopelessly corrupt before it could take hold. A t this point it is appropriate to bring in the name of Locke. In the T w o Treatises o f G overnm ent, published if not written nine or so years before this debate, he had argued that societies formed by the simple occupation and cultivation of vacant land would be unlikely to become more than patriarchal fam ily groups, in which little or no institutional government was required to administer the natural law .28 It was the invention of money that had changed this state of affairs. “ Fancy and agreement” had assigned a fictitious value to gold and silver; and these, being more durable than the consumer goods of real value to man, could be stored up, used to assign an exchange value to goods and land, and employed as the means of acquiring more than a man required for satisfaction of his natural wants29 (including, it might reasonably be added, power over other men). M oney, therefore, that partly fictitious and partly perdurable entity, was the precondition of societies on a larger scale than the purely patriarchal, which required exchange relations between the natural rulers of families and tribes, governments capable of dealing with problems rather more complex than those arising between Abraham and Lot, and increasingly sophis­ ticated conceptions of the property rights which were the occasion of 27 Boulton, p. 38. 28 Second Treatise, #36-8; Laslett, ed. (Cambridge), pp. 334-38. 29 #46-50; Laslett, pp. 342-44. “Fancy and agreement” is on p. 342; see also #37, pp. 335-3 PP* 25"2771 Above, ch. iv, n. 22. 72 R eview (facsimile book 7), vol. in, no. 92, p. 365. 453

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If any Man requires an Answer to such things as these, they may find it in this Ejaculation— Great is the Pow er of Imagination! Trade is a M ystery, which will never be compleatly discover’d or understood; it has its Critical Junctures and Seasons, when acted by no visible Causes, it suffers Convulsion Fitts, hysterical Disorders, and most unaccountable Emotions— Sometimes it is acted by the evil Spirit of general Vogue, and like a meer Possession ’tis hurry’d out of all common Measures; today it obeys the Course of things, and submits to Causes and Consequences; tom orrow it suffers Violence from the Storms and Vapours of Human Fancy, operated by exotick Projects, and then all runs counter, the Motions are excentrick, unnatural and unaccountable— A Sort of Lunacy in Trade attends all its Circumstances, and no Man can give a rational Account of it.73 But the unbridled power of fantasy, which to the W hig and pro­ moter o f trade Defoe here seems the main importation of early capi­ talism into human affairs, is not simply the wheel of fortune running eccentrically about its unmoving axis; as he very well knows, it is part of a huge new force in human affairs, creating new modes of w ar and prosperity, a new balance of power in Europe, a new conquest of the planet. In this respect Credit resembled less fortuna than virtu, the innovative conquering force which, in the most dynamic moments of Machiavelli’s vision, created the disorder, symbolized as fortuna, which it then set out to dominate b y means so far irrational and amoral that they could be seen as part of the anarchy they pretended to cure. It is arguable that not since Machiavelli himself have we met with language as evocative of his innermost w ays of thinking as that of Davenant and Defoe. But if Machiavelli may have supplied the language which Defoe found appropriate for depicting volcanic and irrational social innova­ tion, he had at the same time supplied b y w ay of Harrington— and in a form recognizable to contemporaries— the language and parameters by which what Credit was doing could be denounced as corruption. In 1 710 Defoe, who b y the next year would be facing fire from S w ift’s Exam iner, had to find means of depicting Credit as a stabilizing, virtu­ ous, and intelligent agency; and here she appears as the daughter of Probity and Prudence, as volatile and temperamental as ever, but capa­ ble of recognizing what Davenant had called “ the stock of real merit.” Am ong her characteristics is an extreme timorousness; she is thrown into fits at the mere sight of a Sacheverell mob and a panic among the W higs is all but fatal to her.74 O nly as the public peace is restored and 73 R eview (facsimile book 8), vol. 111, no. 126, pp. 502-503. 74 Review (facsimile book 17), vol. vn, no. 55, pp. 213-15; no. 57, pp. 221-23; no. 58, pp. 225-28; no. 59, pp. 229-31. 454

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the public nerve is recovered, does she begin to revive, and Defoe is at pains to show that she is a public being, who can exist only where men have confidence in one another and in the kingdom. This confi­ dence— the substance of which Credit is the volatile reflection— can only be publicly expressed. Th e Diseases of Credit are as peculiar to Parliaments, as the Disease call’d the E vil , is to the Sovereign; none can cure them but them­ selves— The R oyal Touch has no Healing Virtue in it for this Dis­ temper; Queen and Parliament United may do it, but neither by themselves can. Credit was not so short-sighted a Politician, as not to know this— The Thing is certain, Parliaments are the Foundation of our Funds; the Honour and Justice of Parliaments in preserving the Publick on one Hand , and a firm adherence to the great Principle of making good former Engagements, and supplying the Deficiency of Parlia­ mentary Security , on the other, these are the great Channels of Credit. . . . Credit is not dependant on the Person of the Sovereign, upon a M inistry, or upon this or that Management; but upon the Honour o f the Publick Administration in General, and the Justice of Parliaments in Particular, in keeping whole the Interest of those that have ventured their Estates upon the Publick Faith— N or must any Intervention of Parties be of N otice in this Case— For if one Party being uppermost shall refuse to make good the Deficiencies of the M inistry that went before them , because another Party then had the Management, Parliamentary Credit would not be worth a Farthing. . . . Credit is too w ary, too C oy a L ad y to stay with any People upon such mean Conditions; if you will entertain this Virgin, you must act upon the nice Principles of Honour, and Justice; you must pre­ serve Sacred all the Foundations, and build regular Structures upon them; you must answer all Demands, with a respect to the Solemnity, and Value of the Engagement; with respect to Justice, and Honour; and without any respect to Parties— If this is not observ’d, Credit will not come; N o, tho’ the Queen should call; tho’ the Parliament shou’d call, or tho’ the whole Nation should call.75 Addison took up the theme in number 3 of the Spectator. Credit appears seated in the Bank, beneath the emblems o f the Ancient Con­ stitution and the Revolution Settlement, and surrounded b y heaps of gold and bags of money. She appeared indeed infinitely timorous in all her Behaviour; And, 75 R eview (facsimile book 18), vol.

v ii ,

no. 1 16, p. 463.

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whether it was from the Delicacy of her Constitution, or that she was troubled with Vapours, as I was afterwards told by one who I found was none of her W ell-wishers, she changed Colour, and star­ tled at everything she heard. She was likewise (as I afterwards found) a greater Valetudinarian than any I had ever met with, even in her own Sex, and subject to such M omentary Consumptions, that in the twinkling of an E ye, she would fall aw ay from the most florid Com­ plexion, and the most healthful State of Body, and wither into a Skeleton. Her Recoveries were often as sudden as her Decays, inso­ much that she would revive in a Moment out of a wasting Distemper, into a Habit of the highest Health and V igou r.76 W hen the spirits o f popery, tyranny, and republicanism appear before her, Credit collapses; the moneybags become filled with wind, and the gold is transformed into piles of paper and notched tallies; but with the entrance of the spirits of liberty, moderation, and the Protes­ tant succession, all is restored. Credit is now being translated into virtue, in the entirely moral and societal sense of that word. The precondition of her health is the health of all society and the practice of all the moral activities which society entails; and she is being endowed with a faculty of perception sufficient to inform her whether these conditions are being met. Show her real merit and real goods, and the goods which she returns to you will be real also. The wealth created by Credit is described in terms of real bullion, and it is characteristic of Addison that he depicted the R oyal Exchange not as a place of dealing in stocks and funds, but as a con­ course lof solid merchants exchanging real commodities through the mediuiA of money.77 The ideological thrust was constantly toward the absorption of stockjobber into merchant: the rentier, who frightened social theorists, into the entrepreneur, who did not. Virtue was now the cognition o f social, moral and commercial reality, and every­ thing possible had been done to eliminate the element of fantasy and fiction which had seemed so subversive of property and personality. But the restoration of virtue was subject to a single sharp limitation, one of singular relevance to the epistemological structure of this book. Imagination— the subversive, creative, and destructive power depicted in the boomtime of 1706— is replaced in the W hig literature of 17101 7 1 1 b y nothing more than opinion; in Locke’s terminology, the emphasis is switched from “ fan cy” to “ agreement.” The latter, of course, is social where the former is arbitrary and egocentric, and this 76 The Spectator, ed. Smith (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, Everyman Library, 1961), p. 11. 77 Spectator, no. 69; ed. cit., pp. 212-15. Note the neo-Harringtonian finale.

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makes it more rational and virtuous. But the rationality is only that of opinion and experience; and none of the rhetoric about the transforma­ tion o f Credit into confidence b y supplying her judgment with real and concrete data serves to eliminate the volatility with which she oscillates between the extremes of hope and fear. Opinion, it was com­ mon form to assert, was the slave of these two passions; and in the case of Credit, not only were the data on which opinion was formed at least partly imaginary, but even those well founded in concrete reality fig­ ured to the imagination— in which opinion was shaped— as features of a mobile, somewhat Hobbesian, universe in which every object was potentially a source of either profit or loss, a subject of both hope and fear. Hobbes had laid it down that the observation of covenants— to be exact, the establishment of a law of nature that covenants must be observed— was the only cure for the insecurity produced b y the fears and fantasies of men, but had left it uncertain just how fearful and fantastic man arrived at the discovery of this law. Defoe and Addison, operating in a speculative society where the performance of one com­ mercial covenant was the occasion— as with Machiavelli’s “ innova­ tion” — of the immediate embarking upon another, had greater need still to show how covenant might keep pace with fantasy but even greater difficulty in doing so; in their world reason was indeed the slave of the passions. N or was Credit a mere observer and reflector of this universe; she helped to shape it. As her hopes and fears overreacted to every stimu­ lus, the objects concerning which she formed them gained or lost both value and reality; the universe o f commerce and investment was, ines­ capably, to some degree fantastic and nonrational. Given all the resources of a virtuous society, Credit could coordinate them on a greater scale than ever before in history; but she contributed nothing beyond fantasy, opinion, and passion to making society virtuous in the first place. V irtue must involve the cognition of things as they really were; the power of Credit was irredeemably subjective and it would take all the authority of society to prevent her from breaking loose to submerge the world in a flood of fantasy. It seems possible that she is part of Pope’s Great Anarch. A t this point, much of the conventional wisdom in modern historiog­ raphy of social thought encourages us to take up the theme of a labor theory of value. If Lock e’s experimenting with such a theory had been intended or understood as a contribution to the Augustan debate, it might indeed have served as the powerful instrument of reification which M arx was to declare it had been. If men created b y their labor the values of the goods they exchanged, the reality of a world of com­ 457

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modity and commerce would be assured; and it is conceivable that Adam Smith, three generations later, was engaged in such a venture of validation. But until more is known of the history of labor theory dur­ ing the eighteenth century, we shall not have the evidence for asserting that Locke was used in the w ay described. Defoe and Addison do not seem to have reified the world of speculation and exchange b y alluding to the labor that gave it value, and the substitution of homo faber for homo politicus was not effected. T h ey sought instead to validate the commercial world by appeal to conceptions of public virtue, but found themselves confronted by the paradigm of a citizen whose virtue did not rest upon a capacity for exchange. From this point there were two directions in which the Augustan mind might go. It might assert that the foundations of government were, as they had always been, in virtue, which presupposed both an individual capable of ruling and knowing himself, and a social struc­ ture which he could know clearly enough to rule his own part in it. The appropriate material foundation for this was land: real property cognizable as stable enough to link successive generations in social rela­ tionships belonging to, or founded in, the order of nature. Such a gov­ ernment would tend to be a commonwealth (with monarch) of inde­ pendent proprietors with a balanced and ancient constitution, fortified b y immemorial customs which helped keep the parts independent and in place; it would be patriotic in defense, but would avoid w ar and empire. But the ambivalences of the neo-Harringtonian posture reveal that those who took this direction could no longer present history in terms of an uninterrupted continuity of values. Change had occurred; they were looking to a past, and seeking to defend virtue against inno­ vative forces, symbolized as trading empire ,78 standing armies, and credit. The second stood for specialization and the alienation of one’s capacities; the last for fantasy, fiction, and social madness, the menace of a false consciousness which would engulf men in a sort of political Dunciad; both stood for corruption, and minds of this persuasion shared to the full the humanist tendency to see corruption as irreversi­ ble. Their attitude toward change was therefore negative, but they recognized it even as they repudiated it. Their thought was Machia­ vellian in its recognition that society was being cut loose from natural order, in its definition of the natural order that was being left behind, and in its affirmation that there were basic virtues, ordini and principii, to which a return might be made b y means of moral legislation. W hen they set up frugality, the militia, or the independence of the parts of 78 See Bloom and Bloom, Joseph Addison's Sociable Animal, pp. 67-83 (ch. 4, “The W ar of Economic Right” ), for an interesting study of Addison conceding that commerce breeds war and must justify it.

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the balanced constitution, as ideals to which a patriot parliament or a patriot king might bring about a return by means of legislation or educative example, they revealed their acceptance of a disjunction between the moral and material components of society, and between value and history.79 T h ey were conceding that social change was no longer guaranteeing virtue, but claiming that virtue might be reaffirmed independently of social conditions and might even change them. The alternative was to admit that government was an affair of man­ aging the passions. If money and credit had indeed dissolved the social frame into a shifting mobility of objects that were desired and fictions that were fantasized about, then passion, opinion, and imagination were indeed the motors of human behavior and the sources of human cogni­ tion. It is clear, however, from what we have seen that this was strong meat even for the tough-minded Defoe; he busied himself, especially when challenged b y Sw ift, to show how opinion and passion might be grounded upon experience rather than imagination, and become the means of recognizing the real goods of society and the real sociability of men. As we saw, however, this did not eliminate the hysterical vola­ tility of Credit, and all the resources of social stability must be mobi­ lized by crown, parliament, and public, to satisfy the hypersensitive nervous system with which society was now endowed and to control the impulses of human hope and fear. So mobile a human universe, moreover, was unlikely to contain institutional orderings of values, located in a past to which return might be made; an eternal morality there was, but it consisted in the virtues of sociability themselves and not in any set of legislative constructs by which virtue was guaranteed. T he Court W hig version of history, therefore, was not directly legitimatory; it agreed with that of the neo-Harringtonians in finding a society of agrarian warriors in the past, but denied both that this could be restored and that it had embodied principles which could be reas­ serted in the present. The corresponding version o f politics, as we shall see in a further section, denies that there is a formulaically balanced constitution whose principles are fundamental to government. For this to be so there must be a classically cognizable history and a classically cognizable society, neither of which is to be expected in a universe of mobile credit and expectation, concerning which and in which there can only be opinion and passion. The government of the Court W higs reigns over a mobile society and has sovereign managerial powers, if only because there are no cognizable principles to which its authority can be reduced. It exists in a history of change and flux, and must pragmatically do what must be done b y operating upon human pas­ 79 Kramnick, pp. 166-69, discusses this point with reference to Bolingbroke. 459

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sions in the w ays demanded b y the moment. Man remaining sociable— except when driven lunatic b y cupidity and imagination— there are real virtues, real passions of sympathy and honesty, to secure the edifice of government in an actual moral universe. But the question is always pragmatic: is credit in harmony with confidence, are men’s opinions, hopes, and fears concerning each other operating to stabilize society and increase prosperity? Governm ent’s business— the voice o f G u ic­ ciardini’s Bernardo distantly assures us— is to act so that this happens, not to be constantly relegislating some formalized fram ework in which alone, it is assumed, virtue can flourish. And if there is no such frame­ work, the individual as zdon politikon cannot be forever form ally reas­ serting his own civic being, or renewing its principles. His business is to get on with his social life, practice its virtues, and make his contribu­ tion to the credit and confidence which men repose in one another;80 but his world will be primarily conventional and subjective, and only experience (and the state of the market) will tell him how far his opin­ ions concerning reality are founded upon truth. W e have perhaps reached the point of defining that “ privatization” which modern his­ torians are fond of detecting in the philosophies of commercial society. This analysis of the language of Augustan social awareness has revealed it to be Machiavellian in a number of ways, which we could never have found it to be had we based the analysis on an explanation of Locke. W e have found that Machiavellian and Harringtonian para­ digms were exploited by late seventeenth-century minds in setting up an image of a free and uncorrupt society, and that something close to the Machiavellian vocabulary of virtu and fortuna was employed to express a sense of innovation, loss of legitimacy, and flux at the rapid movement of social change aw ay from that ideal. W e have found that a new version of the classical theory of corruption was necessitated b y an awareness of the growing relations between government, war, and finance, and that mercantilist warfare caused a revival of interest in the external relationships of commonwealths with other commonwealths and with empires. W e have found that it was through the image of the rentier, the officer, and the speculator in public funds, not through that of the merchant or dealer upon a market, that capitalism imparted its first shock and became involved in its first major controversy in the history of English-language political theory. W e have found that a “ bourgeois ideology,” a paradigm for capitalist man as zdon politikon, was immensely hampered in its development by the omnipresence of 80 Addison’s The Freeholder (1715-16) adjures the individual to limit both the intensity and the range of his participation in government. See nos. 5, 16, 24, 25, 29, 48, and especially nos. 51 (whose modernism should be compared with Hobbes on the political consequences of reading ancient politics) and 52-55.

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Aristotelian and civic humanist values which virtually defined rentier and entrepreneur as corrupt, and that if indeed capitalist thought ended b y privatizing the individual, this m ay have been because it was unable to find an appropriate w ay of presenting him as citizen. “ Bourgeois ideology,” which old-fashioned Marxism depicted as appearing with historic inevitability, had, it seems, to wage a struggle for existence and m ay never have fu lly won it. Finally, the conflict between real and mobile property, seen by Augustans as the material foundations of social existence, proved to entail a conflict— or more properly, an ambivalence— between modes o f social epistemology; the cognition of society through money and credit being unequivocally presented b y all concerned in terms of opinion and passion, fantasy and false consciousness. T h e deep concern felt b y eighteenth-century philosophers with the relations between rea­ son and the passions would seem to have something to do with the conflict between the landed and monied interests; but it m ay be worth emphasizing that this conclusion has not been arrived at through for­ mal or informal Marxist analysis. A Marxist would probably assert that the conflict between real and mobile property is a sole and sufficient explanation of the philosophers’ concern with reason and passion, but no need has been found to make that assertion here. It is normal M arx­ ist procedure to arrive at connections between social perception and property relations through a process of “ demystification,” but that too has not been necessary; Davenant and Defoe were thoroughly and explicitly aware of what they meant to say. Rather than performing an exercise in Marxist analysis, it would seem, we have been studying the historical beginnings of the sort o f thought found in Marx. The Augustan journalists and critics were the first intellectuals on record to express an entirely secular awareness of social and economic changes going on in their society, and to say specifically that these changes affected both their values and their modes of perceiving social reality. T h e y used largely Machiavellian paradigms to articulate and express this awareness.

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C H A P T E R X IV

T H E E IG H T E E N T H -C E N T U R Y D EBA TE Virtue, Passion and Commerce

[i] d e b a t e w e h a v e u n c o v e r e d — that between virtue and passion, land and commerce, republic and empire, value and history— under­ lay a great part of the social thinking of the eighteenth century. In the two remaining chapters an attempt will be made to display its role in the American Revolution and the formation of American values, and to depict this part of the story in a wider context of the develop­ ment of European thought, so that Jefferson and Hamilton may emerge in a broadly discernible relationship to Rousseau and Marx. It can be shown both that the American Revolution and Constitution in some sense form the last act of the civic Renaissance, and that the ideas of the civic humanist tradition— the blend of Aristotelian and Machiavel­ lian thought concerning the zdon politikon — provide an important key to the paradoxes of modern tensions between individual self-awareness on the one hand and consciousness of society, property, and history on the other. The American founders occupied a “ Machiavellian moment” — a crisis in the relations between personality and society, vir­ tue and corruption— but at the same time stood at a moment in history when that problem was being either left behind or admitted insoluble; it depended on the point of view. Our task in the present chapter is to understand as fully as possible the reasons w h y the inherited complex of ideas concerning republican virtue and its place in social time was transmitted into the eighteenth century in a form at once so adamant and so vulnerable, so little changed and yet so radically challenged. Th e story as we have traced it is, first, that of how the Athenian assertion that man was zdon politikon , b y nature a citizen, was revived in a paradoxical though not a directly challenging relation with the Christian assertion that man was homo religiosus, formed to live in a transcendent and eternal communion, known, however, by the omi­ nously political name of civitas D ei ; second, that of how the ensuing debate merged with some consequences of the Protestant assertion that all believers were priests, and society, rather than church, the true the

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ecclesia. As Puritanism, followed in this respect b y rational deism, denied more and more systematically the separateness of the religious organization of society, it became increasingly necessary to affirm that civic was one with religious liberty, and virtue— in the civic sense— one with salvation. The terms in which such claims were made might be evangelical and millenarian; at another extreme they might be postChristian and utopian; but in either case they reflected the seculariza­ tion of personality, its increasing involvement with a projection of society that was historical whether or not it was soterial. Since aware­ ness of what transcendental Christianity meant did not die out, it was not forgotten that this affirmation was paradoxical and subversive: Montesquieu could reiterate Machiavelli’s acknowledgment that civic virtue was self-contained and secular, identical neither with the Chris­ tian communion nor with a social morality founded on purely Christian values.1 But as the citizen became less like the saint, his civic personality required a virtu less like his soul’s capacity for redemption and more like the autonomy of Aristotle’s megalopsychic man or— in the period that concerns us— the amour de soi-meme of Rousseau; and this moral­ ity required a foundation less spiritual and more social and even material. W e have seen how this foundation was supplied, first b y arms and then b y property— of which real, inheritable, and, so to speak, natural property in land2 was the paradigmatic case; for since the function of property was to affirm and maintain the reality of personal autonomy, liberty, and virtue, it must if possible display a reality (one is tempted to say a realty) capable of spanning the generations and permitting the living to succeed the dead in a real and natural order.3 Inheritance, therefore, appeared more than ever before the mode of economic trans­ mission proper to a society’s existence in time. Land and inheritance remained essential to virtue, and virtue to the ego’s reality in its own sight; there is an element of existential fear about the dread of corrup­ tion so prominent in eighteenth-century social values. For the ideal of personality-sustaining property was no sooner formulated than it was seen to be threatened— Locke helping to give expression to ambiguities 1 In the “Avertissement de l’Auteur” prefixed to the Esprit des Lois; quoted below, n. 78. 2 Property is technically always artificial (vide the words of Ireton, above, p. 375); but property in land was thought to arise when men and their families moved freely, and in this sense “naturally,” on the face of the earth. It could also be argued that property in flocks and herds had preceded it and was more “natural” still. 3 See the language of Burke’s Reflections, discussed in Politics, Language and Tim e, pp. 210-12, in which it is argued that societies where property and rights are envisaged as inheritances are most like families and so most natural.

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that had meant nothing to Harrington. Forms of property were seen to arise which conveyed the notion of inherent dependence: salaried office, reliance on private or political patronage, on public credit. For these the appropriate term in the republican lexicon was corruption— the substitution of private dependencies for public authority— and the threat to individual integrity and self-knowledge which corruption had always implied was reinforced by the rise of forms of property seem­ ing to rest on fantasy and false consciousness. Once property was seen to have a symbolic value, expressed in coin or in credit, the founda­ tions of personality themselves appeared imaginary or at best con­ sensual: the individual could exist, even in his own sight, only at the fluctuating value imposed upon him b y his fellows, and these evalua­ tions, though constant and public, were too irrationally performed to be seen as acts of political decision or virtue. The threat posed b y cor­ ruption cut deep; we have next to consider w hy, and with what effects, there was no consoling or satisfactory answer to it. T he counter-ethics and counter-politics we have watched beginning to arise were based on a series of mitigations of the concept of fantasy or imagination: passion, opinion, interest. T o the extent to which the credit economy could be convincingly presented as based on the exchange of real goods and the perception of real values, it could be divorced from the threat of false consciousness and endowed with con­ cepts of the public good and personal virtue. In what scholars have called a “ Protestant ethic” of frugality, self-denial, and reinvestment, trading society could even be permitted its own version of that classi­ cal virtue which consisted in placing the common good (in this case the circulation of trade) above one’s personal profit. But to a very high degree indeed, the ethic of frugality was compelled to take second place to the ethic of self-interest. T he landed man, successor to the master of the classical oikos, was permitted the leisure and autonomy to consider what was to others’ good as well as his own; but the indi­ vidual engaged in exchange could discern only particular values— that of the commodity which was his, that of the commodity for which he exchanged it. His activity did not oblige or even permit him to contem­ plate the universal good as he acted upon it, and he consequently con­ tinued to lack classical rationality. It followed that he was not con­ scious master of himself, and that in the last analysis he must be thought of as activated b y nonrational forces— those governing the universe of credit rather than the universe of trade. Techniques certainly existed— of which Addison was a literary master— of elevating his motivation to at least the lower forms of rationality and morality: opinion, prudence, confidence, sympathy, even charity; but behind all this lay the ancient problem of showing how society might operate rationally and bene­

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ficially when the individuals composing it were denied full rationality and virtue. Solutions were of course to be found in seeking to depict society as an economic mechanism, in which the exchange of goods and the divi­ sion of labor operated to turn universal selfishness to universal benefit. In Addison, Mandeville, and Montesquieu we find variously presented4 the image of the woman who wants a new gown for thoroughly selfish and whimsical reasons— woman as capricious consumer is a recurrent feature of the rather prominent sexism found in Augustan social criti­ cism— and instantly sets tradesmen and artisans to w ork in w ays whose benefit to society is in no w ay commensurate with the triviality of her motivation. The reason as Montesquieu gives it is that “ self-interest is the strongest monarch in the w orld.” 5 But there was an important sense in which all this was either beside the point or the admission of a neces­ sary evil: social m orality was becoming divorced from personal moral­ ity, and from the ego’s confidence in its own integrity and reality. Mandeville, whose principal works appeared between 17 14 and 1732, won a reputation in his own time akin to those of Machiavelli and Hobbes in theirs, b y proclaiming that “ private vices” were “ public benefits.” He argued that the mainspring of social behavior was not self-love— based on knowledge of one’s self as one was; Rousseau’s amour de soi-meme— but what he called self-liking and Rousseau was to call am our-propre: based on the figure one cut in one’s own eyes and those of others.6 On this basis he built up a complex social psychol­ ogy based on the ideas of custom— b y which he meant manners rather than usages, fantasy rather than experience— and honor, b y which was meant no feudal ethos of heroic pride and shame, but the other-directed intersubjectivity that had led Defoe to use honor as a synonym for credit. A t bottom he was saying that the real world of economy and polity rested on a myriad fantasy worlds maintained b y private egos; and he deeply disturbed his contemporaries, less b y telling them that they were greedy and selfish than b y telling them that they were 4 Addison, Spectator, no. 69 (see Bloom and Bloom, pp. 38-39); Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, Remark G (ed. Harth, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970, p. 120); Montesquieu, Lettres Persanes, cvi. 5 “ . . . l’interet est le plus grande monarque de la Terre.” Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 288. 6 See An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War, ed. and intro. M. M. Goldsmith (London: Frank Cass, 1971), pp. xiii, xxiii. Rousseau’s distinction is in the Discours sur Vinegalite (Vaughan, ed.), The Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), 1, 217. It is interesting that Mandeville was aware of the etymology and history of the word virtus and its origins in a warrior ethos; see his preface to the Enquiry, pp. iii-vii.

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unreal, and must remain so if society was to persist. T h e specter o f false consciousness had arisen, and was proving more frightening than that of Machiavellian realpolitik. In the civic humanist ethos, then, the individual knew himself to be rational and virtuous, and possessed what we can now call amour de soi-meme, inasmuch as he knew himself to be a citizen and knew how to play his role and take decisions within the politeia or modo di vivere of a republic. G iven the spatio-temporal finitude and instability of any republic, this had always been a precarious and threatened mode of selfaffirmation, requiring heroic virtue if not a special grace; and the great Florentine theorists had worked out the implications of this paradox. In Puritan England and Augustan Britain, there had emerged a theory of freehold and real property as the foundations of personality, auton­ omy, and commonwealth; but the challenge posed to this b y the emer­ gence of new forms of property and political economy restated in a new form the problem of individuality and temporal instability— in other words, that of value and history. T he universe of real property and personal autonomy now seemed to belong to a historic past; new and dynamic forces, of government, commerce, and war, presented a universe which was effectively superseding the old but condemned the individual to inhabit a realm of fantasy, passion, and amour-propre. He could explain this realm, in the sense that he could identify the forces of change that were producing it; he could identify and pursue the goals proposed to him b y his passions and fantasies; but he could not explain himself by locating himself as a real and rational being within it. The worlds of history and value therefore extruded one another, and what would later be described as the alienation of man from his history had begun to be felt; but, far from seeing himself as a mere product of historical forces, the civic and propertied individual was endowed with an ethic that clearly and massively depicted him as a citizen of classical virtue, the inhabitant of a classical republic, but exacted the price of obliging him to regard all the changes transform­ ing the world of government, commerce, and war as corruption— cor­ ruption essentially the same as that which had transformed Rome from republic into empire. Hence the age’s intense and nervous neoclassicism. T h e dominant paradigm for the individual inhabiting the world of value was that of civic man; but the dominant paradigm for the indi­ vidual as engaged in historic actuality was that of economic and intersubjective man, and it was peculiarly hard to bring the two together. W e therefore find that all that sociology of liberty which had devel­ oped from Aristotle through Machiavelli and Harrington was accessible to British (and to French anglomanic) thought in the form of the “ Country” or “ Old W h ig” ideology, which expressed in great detail

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the values o f civic liberty, the moral and political conditions under which they flourished or decayed, and the interpretation of European and English history in which they were seen as developing and as increasingly exposed to threats of corruption; but that this was obliged b y its postulates to attack as corruptive a number o f important trends which it isolated as those of a “ modern” world. In opposition to it can be found, less eloquently rhetorical because less morally normative, a “ Court” ideology— prefigured in such writings as D efoe’s— which accurately identified the forces making for historical change and explained how government must and did w ork on its new foundations, but which supplied neither polity nor personality with a coherent moral structure. Its attitude to historical change was one of pragmatic acceptance; it denied that government was based on principles to which there could be a return; and its moral and philosophical theory affirmed that the mainsprings of both motivation and perception in human beings were pride and passion, fantasy and self-interest, which it tended to describe in Mandevillean and Hobbesian terms. Hard as it was to reconcile the philosophies of value and history, virtue and pas­ sion, property and credit, self-love and self-liking, the conditions of British politics in the eighteenth century, with their sharply prescribed interdependence between Court and Country, commanded that some such attempt be made and that neither thesis could be expounded with­ out making some concessions to the other. But in the American colo­ nies— the present state of research strongly suggests— the ideology that presented virtue as ever threatened by corruption was little mitigated b y any sense that it was possible to live with the forces of history and contain them. This circumstance helped bring about the division of the Atlantic world in the great civil w ar of the Am erican Revolution; it presented the civic humanist intellect with an unparalleled oppor­ tunity of applying the sociology of liberty to legislation in the sense of actual state-founding; but since the forces of change and modernity had crossed the Atlantic somewhat in advance of the governmental imperative that compelled their recognition, it further ensured that the attempt at classical legislation would encounter its crises and display its paradoxes.

[ii] Cato's Letters, which were originally published in the London Jo u r­ nal between 1720 and 1724, were written b y John Trenchard— a vet­ eran of the “ paper w ar” of 1698— and his protege Thomas Gordon, and with the far more anticlerical The Independent W hig, appearing from the same pens about the same time, formed some o f the most

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w idely distributed political reading of the contemporary American colonists.7 Cato was mainly bent on diagnosing and proposing to remedy the state of national corruption revealed by the failure of the South Sea Company— much, it should be noted, as Montesquieu’s Lettres Yersanes ( 17 2 1) were concerned with the similar state o f affairs precipitated in France by the failure of John L a w ’s Mississippi schemes;8 but in Britain the themes it appeared necessary to Cato to take up had been the matter of debate for a quarter of a century. It was neither accidental nor surprising that an old adversary of the stand­ ing army should find himself denouncing a gigantic job of the “ mon­ ied interest,” since the two were taken to be at bottom one and the same phenomenon. Cato— Trenchard was the senior partner, though G ordon’s contributions were numerous— develops an unmistakably Machiavellian and neo-Harringtonian critique of corruption and of the republic which is its opposite; and he specifically declares that England (or Britain) is a republic, of that peculiarly happy kind which has a king as its chief magistrate.9 This republic instantly begins to display Machiavellian characteristics: it must be inexorably revengeful against those (the South Sea Directors) who have wronged it,10 and its free­ dom cannot long continue without an equality in the distribution of property and consequently of pow er.11 Machiavelli had discussed the necessity of an equalitd of this order, but like him Cato had in mind not so much a leveling of property as “ an agrarian law, or something like it” to ensure that no individual or group became so rich as to reduce others to dependence.12 The words “ or something like it” reveal that we are no longer in a purely landed commonwealth; what is to be dreaded is not vassalage, but indebtedness and the corruption through dependence that it brings. Peculation is the worst of crimes against the public,13 the freeholders should never let themselves be represented in parliament b y “ men whose estates are embarked in companies” ;14 exclu­ sive trading companies, like those designed for the East Indies and the 7 R obbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonrwealthman, pp. 1 15 -2 5 ; Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic: the Origin of the American Tradition of Political Liberty (N e w Y o rk : H arco u rt Brace, 19 5 3), pp. 14 1, 492; Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cam bridge, Mass.: T h e Belknap Press, 196 7), pp. 35-37, and The Origins of American Politics (N e w Y o rk : V in tage Books, 1970 ), pp. 40-44; D avid L . Jacobson, The English Liber­ tarian Heritage (Indianapolis: Bobbs M errill, 19 6 5), introduction (the text con ­ sists w h o lly o f selections from C a to ). 8 Lettres Persanes, x x iv , x c v m , c x x x i i , c x x x v m , c x l i i , c x l v i . 9 Cato's Letters: or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects; 3d ed., Lon do n , 1723, 11, 28. 10 Cato's Letters , 1, 6-7, and passim. 11 Cato's Letters , 1, 11. 12Cato's Letters , 11, 16, 7 1-7 4 , 85-90. 13 Cato's Letters , 1, 134 -35. 14Cato's Letters, 111, 24.

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South Seas, reduce the landowner to debt, bring about the destruction of trade and corrupt government b y introducing inequality.15 Spurius Melius, who sought to bring the people into dependence b y monopoliz­ ing the corn supply, was heroic Rom e’s chief enemy within,16 whereas to Harrington he was no more than the subject of a remark in pass­ ing about the minor dangers to liberty presented b y trade.17 Cato has fully accepted the fact, if also the danger, of such a society; something more than an agrarian law will be needed to ensure that equality which means that all men are equally free and equally subject to public authority— equal in their opportunity of virtue, for if they are not there can be no virtue. But equality in this sense tends to preclude the discovery of any precise equivalent to an agrarian law, and apart from the undesirability of exclusive companies and a heavy burden of public debt, Cato does not tell us what specific measures should be taken to ensure equality in a trading society. If “ equality” means no more than an equal sub­ jection to the res publica, no more need (or can) be done to ensure it than to reassert the public authority— Machiavelli’s ridurre ai principii, which turned out to have little more concrete content than that; but (to approach the problem from its other aspect) since where the public authority is impeded b y inequality there is corruption, and where there is corruption there is no virtue, the reassertion of the res publica in its uncorrupt form is readily identifiable with the reassertion of virtue. Cato’s call for equality therefore makes up in moral fervor for what it lacks b y w ay of a specific program; and though for much of the time he is m erely calling for uprightness and independence in the peo­ ple and their representatives and magistrates, the summons need not have been limited to a purely moral content. The crucial evil of corrup­ tion was, to many a theorist, that it disturbed the balance of the con­ stitution; that of the growth of a monied interest that it perverted the relationships between executive, parliament, and propertied people; and a call for virtue and the restitution of the res publica might have been a program for restoration of constitutional relationships in what was supposed to have been their properly balanced form. Cato, however, was not primarily a constitutional theorist, and to the extent that he was not the concept of virtue dictated a politics of 15 Cato's Letters, h i , 199-213. 16 Cato's Letters, 1, 69-70. 17 Toland, W orks, p. 28: “As for dominion personal or in mony, it may now and then stir up a Melius or a Manlius, which, if the commonwealth be not pro­ vided with some kind of dictatorian power, may be dangerous, though it has bin seldom or never successful: because to property producing empire, it is requir’d that it should have som certain root or foot-hold, which, except in land, it cannot have, being otherwise as it were upon the wing.”

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personal morality. As we follow out the explorations of this theme, we find it repeatedly conceded that a trading society possesses a psychol­ ogy of its own, and that this complicates the pursuit and preservation of virtue. Cato’s vision presupposes no agrarian utopia, although G o r­ don tells us of Trenchard in an obituary preface that “ though he was careful to preserve his Estate, he was no w ays anxious to increase it” ;18 the reader is left in no doubt that a society founded in land alone entails the barbarism and vassalage of Poland or the Scottish Highlands and that trade must be added to husbandry if the darker aspects of Gothic society are to be overcome.19 It is true that in the first Rise and Beginning of States, a rough and unhewn Virtue, a rude and savage Fierceness, and an unpolished Passion for Liberty, are the Qualities chiefly in Repute: T o these succeed military Accomplishments, domestick Arts and Sciences, and such political Knowledge and Acquirements, as are necessary to make States great and formidable Abroad, and to preserve Equality and domestick Happiness and Security at Home; and lastly, when these are attained, follow Politeness, speculative Knowledge, moral and experimental Philosophy, with other Branches of Learning, and the whole Train of the Muses.20 But the transition from unpolished virtue to politeness must be made, and made with the assistance of commerce; and we are assured that maritime trade not only can flourish only where there is civil liberty, but can present no possible danger to it. Sailors do not menace the commonwealth as standing armies do. Virtue and liberty protect com­ merce, and commerce ensures liberty and politeness.21 But a complex formula has been required in order to bring virtue and commerce together, and we discover the reason when we find, once again, that considerable intellectual effort has been exerted to make the transition from commerce as fantasy to commerce as enriched and ordered reality. N othing is more certain than that Trade cannot be forced; she is a coy and humorous Dame, who must be won by Flattery and Allure­ ments, and always flies Force and Pow er; she is not confined to Nations, Sects, or Climates, but travels and wanders about the Earth, till she fixes her Residence where she finds the best W elcom e and kindest Reception; her Contexture is so nice and delicate, that she cannot breathe in a tyrannical A ir; W ill and Pleasure are so opposite to her Nature, that but touch her with the Sw ord and she dies: 18 Cato's Letters, i, lvii. 20 Cato's Letters, 111, 27-28.

19 Cato's Letters, n, 305. 21 Cato's Letters, 11, 272-77.

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But if you give her gentle and kind Entertainment, she is a grateful and beneficent Mistress; she w ill turn Desarts into fruitful Fields, Villages into great Cities, Cottages into Palaces, Beggars into Princes, convert Cowards into Heroes, Blockheads into Philosophers; will change the Coverings of little W orm s into the richest Brocades, the Fleeces of harmless Sheep into the Pride and Ornaments of Kings, and b y a farther Metamorphosis will transmute them again into armed Hosts and haughty Fleets.22 But this is Circe’s island; marriage to this enchantress means that we must live in a world of magic and transformation; and the price to be paid is admission that we are governed b y our fantasies and pas­ sions. Cato explains at length that men are governed b y passion, not principle,23 and that the objects of our hopes and fears are for the most part illusory and fantastic;24 it is through the sound of words that men are deceived and misled,25 and stockjobbers form only one class of vil­ lains who manipulate and corrupt men through images of false goods and false honor.26 N o r is this possible m erely because human nature has its weaker side; it is essentially “ chimerical” and the good man as well as the bad must govern b y knowing the passions of men.27 T he lan­ guage of the Letters grows Hobbesian: W hen we say, that if such a Th ing happened, we would be easie; we can only mean, or ought only to mean, that we would be more easie than we are: And in that too we are often mistaken; for new Acquisitions bring new Wants, and imaginary W ants are as pungent as real ones. So that there is the same End of W ishing as of Living, and Death only can still the Appetites.28 But the ideal of civic virtue is not abandoned. Though we are told that to serve the public good is itself a passion, and that passions are called good when they serve the public and bad when they do not, it is no less unequivocally stated: There is scarce any one of the Passions but what is truly laudable, when it centers in the Publick, and makes that its Object. Ambition, Avarice, Revenge, are all so many Virtues, when they aim at the gen­ eral W elfare. I know that it is exceeding hard and rare, for any Man to separate his Passions from his own Person and Interest; but it is certain that there have been such Men. Brutus, Cato, Regulus, Tim oleon, D ion, and Epaminondas, were such, as were many more ancient 22 Cato's 24 Cato's 26 Cato's 28 Cato's

Letters, Letters, Letters, Letters,

n, 267.

23 Cato's Letters, 11, 77-84. 25 Cato's Letters, 1, 82-83. 27 Cato's Letters, 1, 124 -27; 11, 50-52.

11, 5 1. 11, 192-20 1. 11, 5 1. 471

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Greeks and Romans; and, I hope, England has still some such. And though in pursuing publick Views, Men regard themselves and their own Advantages; yet if they regard the Publick more, or their own in Subserviency to the Publick, they may justly be esteemed virtuous and good.29 It is a Machiavellian virtii, in the sense that civic does not always accord with personal morality; but it is a real and classical virtue none­ theless. The passions now appear as the pursuits of private and particu­ lar goods, familiar to us from the whole tradition of Aristotelian politics and ethics; virtue is the passion for pursuing the public good, with which the lesser passions may compete, but into which they may equally be transformed. And corruption is the failure, or the conse­ quences of the failure, to effect this transformation. The “ Publick” ( res publica) is then, to a certain extent, what government was soon to appear in the political theory of Hume: a device or mechanism for requiring men to take long views instead of short, to identify their private interests with the general good, to erect an edifice of reason and virtue on a foundation of passion; but rather more unequivocally than with Hume is it also a device for bringing men out of the cave into the sunlight, from a realm of fantasy into one of reality. And the heroes of the ancient polities are not the mere products of the socializ­ ing machine; their virtue is active and authentic, and may be invoked as a principal means of ensuring virtue in others. As well as the moral example of the virtuous hero, other means of preventing corruption are named which are startlingly classical and humanist. There is the people as guardia della liberta; though the limitations of their public experience render them liable to be deceived by the sound of words and unreal objects, the fact that they do not seek power for themselves means that they have no interest in m ultiplying fantasies for the cor­ ruption of others, and for this reason they may be trusted to undeceive themselves given time.30 In a free society, where the danger of decep­ tion is in any case less, even their fantasies may tend to the public good: for, as Machiavel well observes, When the People are dissatisfied, and have taken a Prejudice against their Governors , there is no Thing nor Person that they ought not to fear.31 There is even a sense in which inequality stands to equality in pre­ cisely the relation of fortuna to virtus, and reveals with particular 29 Cato's Letters, n, 48-49. 30 Cato's Letters, 1, 153-56 , 177-83. 31 Cato's Letters, 1, 180-81. The thought is authentically Machiavellian, though it is not quite clear to what text this passage alludes.

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clarity that the “ equality” which is necessary to republics is strictly speaking an isonomia. Men are equal b y nature, in the sense that all men are born equipped with the same capacities; but fortune unjustly and capriciously distributes the circumstantial advantages of this world, so that some have more of them than others. This makes for emulation, envy, and acquisitiveness, which are not without their utility to society; it also makes for the existence of a ruling class, whose authority checks the tendency of emulation to run to excess. The more and the less for­ tunate, it seems probable, act as checks on one another, and oblige each other’s passions to turn toward service to the common good; and the arbitrariness o f fortune constantly challenges me to affirm m y virtue, in remembering that it at least is not fortune’s gift. W e cannot bring more natural Advantages into the W orld, than other Men do; but we can acquire more Virtue in it than we gener­ ally acquire. T o be great, is not in every Man’s Pow er; but to be good, is in the Pow er of all: Thus far every Man may be upon a Level with another, the lowest with the highest; and Men might thus come to be morally as well as naturally equal.32 These forces, and others like them, operate to maintain virtue in free societies. It is clear that the classical republic, with its distribution of powers and rotation of offices, is the paradigm case of the free society, and that the Ancient Constitution of England resembled the republic in most respects— including the rotation of magistracies,33 b y which the authors seem to have meant frequent parliaments (though nothing is said of the fact that Trenchard had supported the Septennial A ct in 1 7 1 7). But an important modification appears at a later stage in the argument.34 England, it is affirmed, is in its present condition capable of no other form of government than a limited monarchy, because the distribution of property is such that there exists a powerful nobility and a beneficed clergy, both of whom depend upon the patronage of the crown for the wealth and influence which bring other men into dependence on them. There is not, therefore, that equality of property necessary for the existence of a pure republic (even, presumably, a republic of the kind whose head may be a king), and the relations of monarchy and nobility display that restless interdependence which characterized the feudal or “ G othic” monarchy of Harrington. Forces usually identified as those of corruption— courtiers, placemen, exclu­ sive trading companies— operate to maintain the present system; but, insists Cato: 32 Cato's Letters, n, 90; see pp. 85-90 for the argument at length. 33 Cato's Letters, 11, 234-40. 34 Cato's Letters, hi, 159-65.

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If this be the true Circumstance of England at present, as I conceive it indisputably is, we have nothing left to do, or indeed which we can do, but to make the best of our own Constitution, which, if duly administered, provides excellently well for general Liberty; and to secure the Possession of Property, and to use our best Endeavours to make it answer the other Purposes of private Virtue, as far as the Nature of it is capable of producing that End.35 Spartam— or rather Venetiam— nactus es; after all, it would appear, Englishmen have not inherited an equality of property so perfect as to permit the practice of a public, as opposed to private, virtue in a repub­ lic, and must make the most of what they have. Limited monarchy is not a perfectly balanced commonwealth; it is m erely a balance between the forces making for liberty and for corruption, between property and dependence, executive and parliament, good enough to ensure lib­ erty and private virtue and prevent the worst ravages of corruption and fantasy. Trenchard is the writer here, and we plainly hear the voice of 1 7 14 -17 19 ; Old W higs who had joined Tories in a “ Country” move­ ment had been driven b y the latter’s High Church excesses to accept a Court W hig regime,36 which had passed the Septennial A ct and was now moving through the South Sea crisis toward the perfection of W alpolean government. T o writers of the neo-Harringtonian lineage, this meant acceptance of a rule b y patronage and finance which they could never regard as w holly uncorrupt, which could never be restored to the purity of any principle. And the acceptance of facts meant acceptance of the supremacy of passion and interest. There is another aspect to Trenchard’s and G ordon’s indictments of the world of corruption and unreality, which should not pass unre­ marked. From the depiction of the false consciousness of the specula­ tive society,37 in which men insanely pursue the fairy gold of paper schemes, they move to portray other forms of false honor and false consciousness, the product of excessive authority rather than excessive liberty: the world of absolute monarchy, in which individuals and their values are not m erely subject to the autocrat’s power, but exist even in their own eyes simply as defined by him and his courtiers;38 the world of superstition and priestcraft, which is nothing other than that “ kingdom of the fairies” described b y Hobbes in Book iv of Leviathan, where men are kept in subjection b y being obliged to live in a dream­ world of unreal essences and entities.39 T he unstated alliance which we 35 Cato's Letters, 111, 162-63. 36 For the decision of the Commonwealth intellectuals to swallow the Septen­ nial Act, see Robbins, pp. 109-10. 37 Cato's Letters, 1, 16-17, 25-27. 38 Cato's Letters, 1, 88-90. 39 Cato's Letters, 11, 105-12. 474

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earlier noted between Leviathan and Oceana is still operative in these neo-Harringtonians. The authority of the sovereign and the virtue of the citizen both drive aw ay fantasies and depict things and persons as they really are; but where false consciousness for Hobbes was produc­ tive of rebellion, in the republican tradition it issues in corruption. Men who live b y fantasies are manipulated by other men who rule through them. Autocrats, priests, and stockjobbers form a common enemy, and the structure of the argument as we have traced it suggests that it was the last who served as catalyst in precipitating the theory. In the Lettres Persanes, written about the same time as Cato's Letters under the shock of the Mississippi failure, L aw appears as a northern magician, selling the wind in bags and making people believe that it is gold.40 He is empowered to do this b y the authority of a king whose courtiers live, and compel others to live, in a mental world constructed out of nothing but honor in the sense of reputation, itself determined partly b y the autocrat’s fiat and partly b y the courtiers’ mutual self-delusion.41 The courtier is equated with the priest, monk, and bogus philosopher; and analysts42 of those of the Lettres Persanes which deal at a distance with the tragedy of Usbek’s harem have forcibly suggested that the courtier is to be further equated with the eunuch and the corrupt citizen with the alienated woman, so that Montesquieu is carrying the analysis of fantasy and corruption into the sexual basis of the classical oikos. If so, he seems to have abandoned the quest for a virtus in marriage itself (Mandeville had drawn attention to the root masculinity of the term’s derivation from vir)\ the only idyllic relationships in the w ork are based on brother-sister incest and polyandrous erotics respectively,43 and we might come to believe that Montesquieu had despaired of exogamy altogether. Be that as it may, it is apparent that the opposition of virtue to false consciousness was capable of supporting a wide range of sociological analysis. It is perhaps more immediately significant that both Cato and Mon­ tesquieu employ it in the cause of a vigorous anticlericalism. The man of virtue is capable of conducting his own worship, and does so in a setting which is civic where it is not private; the cleric, claiming a m onopoly over this activity, appears, like the soldier, law yer, and stockjobber, one who corrupts by interposing himself in a virtue which all men should practice equally, and— like the latter at least— he can do 40 Lettres Persanes, c x l i i .

41 LettresPersanes, l x x x v ii - x c .

42 Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity (New York: Atheneum, 1970), and Orest Ranum, “Personality and Politics in the Persian Letters,” Politi­ cal Science Quarterly 84, no. 4 (1969), 606-27. 43 “The Story of Apheridon and Astarte,” in Letter l x v ii , and the tale of Anais and Ibrahim in Letter c x l i . 475

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so only b y placing unreal entities before the minds of those he deceives in order to corrupt.44 Trenchard and Gordon shared this view with N eville’s Plato Redivivus , and we recall how Harrington’s republican­ ism merged with the Independent tradition in reducing the clergy to civic functionaries. W hat is noteworthy here is that there is a high degree of correlation in the early eighteenth century between neoHarringtonian republicanism and deism. Sw ift and his Sentiments of a Church of England Man should indeed not be forgotten; but the repub­ lican lineage includes, as well as Cato himself, Toland, Bolingbroke, and in France Henri de Boulainvilliers, an ardent member of the antiChristian literary underground whose Essai sur la Noblesse and Lettres sur les Parlements seek to invest the French nobility with an autono­ mous virtu founded in sang and epee rather than in freehold property.45 Franco Venturi has suggested that the republican example, notably in its English variant, made a more important contribution to the early Enlightenment than has been recognized;46 and in this connection it is interesting to see that republicanism and deism alike carried on the English and Puritan crusade against a clergy enjoying separate or jure divino authority. There is, of course, one entirely crucial breach in continuity between Puritanism and deism. W e have seen that Harrington’s thought con­ formed— perhaps a shade mechanically— to an older tradition which required the republic to locate itself in an apocalyptic moment, and in so doing conformed to another tradition of which Puritanism has a great many instances. N o w apocalyptic was founded upon prophecy, and Hobbes also was among the students of prophecy; but deism, and the Enlightenment generally, were based on a singularly complete rejection of prophecy, revelation, and the H ebrew mode of thought at large. It would be possible to preserve the continuity of deism with Puritanism in the respect which concerns us, by emphasizing such mat­ ters as the self-secularizing tendency inherent in apocalyptic, the emer­ gence of Socinian over millenarian trends in the post-Puritan inherit­ ance— Toland helped mediate both Milton and Harrington to the thought of the eighteenth century— and that transition, explored b y 44 V o lu m e iv o f Cato's Letters, and the com panion series of The Independent W hig, are largely devoted to w o rk in g out this thesis. 45 Renee Sim on, H enry de Boulainviller; historien, politique, philosophe, astrologuey 1658-1722 (Paris: Boivin, 19 4 1) and Un revolte du X V lI le siecle, H enry de Boulainviller (G arch es: Editions du nouvel humanisme, 19 4 8 ); Ira O . W a d e , The Clandestine Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France from 1700 to 17$0 (Princeton U n iversity Press, 19 38 ). 46 Fran co V en tu ri, Utopia a?id Reform in the Enlightenment (Cam bridge U n i­

versity Press, 19 7 1).

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Tuveson, from millennium to utopia. T he more successful w e are, how ­ ever, in anchoring English republican deism in its Puritan inheritance, the more we shall be stressing respects in which England was too mod­ ern to need an Enlightenment and was already engaged upon the quar­ rel with modernity itself. Cato's Letters and the Lettres Persanes alike denounce autocracy, priestcraft, and speculative corruption; but in lands where absolute monarchy and Tridentine Catholicism were reali­ ties and not bogeys, they could not be the rhetorical embellishments of the case against corruption that they were in England. W here the philosophes were fighting to liberate secular history from the authority of the sacred books, the postmillenarist Augustan social critics were examining the impact of historical change on a humanist theory of the social personality which was already w holly secular. It was much more than a persistence of medieval and Renaissance theories of senectus mundi— far from dead as these were— that made the Augustans brood over a still cyclical vision of the corruption of nations;47 they were possessed of a thoroughly social and secular theory of the civic person­ ality, whose parameters suggested that for some centuries social change had been undermining its foundations. T h e y were proto-Rousseauan beneath their W hig combativeness, closer to the romantics than to the philosophes who read them. The Old W higs who appeared about 1698 were, it may be suggested, the first intellectuals of the Left, denounc­ ing their own party’s official leadership for betrayal of its own w holly secular principles; and the poets and satirists who followed Bolingbroke in the 1730s— whether we call them Independent W higs or Tories— erected Sir Robert W alpole into a figure doubly symbolic, to them a monster of corruption but to us the first modern statesman to impress a modern intelligentsia with the belief that his policies and personality were undermining the moral structure of human society.48 Their lan­ guage was humanist, their enemy was modernity, and their posture had something of the sixteenth century about it and something of the twentieth. T he still ebullient Enlightenment had some w ay to go before it could overtake this dualism. [m] T h e Anglo-Atlantic equivalent of the “ Machiavellian moment,” w e have now recognized, had some positive complexities, in terms of eco­ nomics and psychology, not to be found in its Florentine original. The most resonant formulation of its constitutional aspects was the w ork 47 E.g., Cato's Letters, 1, 121. 48 See Kramnick’s Bolingbroke and His Circle, and the present writer’s review in Journal of M odern History 42, no. 2 (19 7 0 ), 2 51-54 .

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of H enry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, between his first and second exiles— both of which were self-chosen— when he elected to conduct a press and pamphlet campaign against W alpole’s administration in lan­ guage directly continuous with that of 1698-1702 and 1 7 1 1 - 1 7 1 4 .49 T h e Country program— frequent parliaments, exclusion of placemen, a qualification in landed property for members of the House of Com­ mons— had originated in the attack on Danby’s ministry in 1675 and had continued as a campaign against major war and its effects on gov­ ernment and finance. Following the collapse of the T o r y party in 1714, a succession of W hig administrations, while not contesting the decision to withdraw from large-scale European campaigning, had set about constructing that political style known as “ the growth of oligarchy.” 50 Its characteristics were a strong and stable executive representing a guaranteed Protestant monarchy in parliament, and a steady diminution of political competitiveness; its means included compromised elections, a Septennial (replacing a Triennial) A ct extending the duration of parliaments, and a system of political management in which patronage played a visible if not an oversignificant part. It further retained that financial structure of banks and funds which had come into being to support war, and whose adversaries, denouncing it as corruption, saw in its continuation as part of the permanent establishment of govern­ ment the fulfillment of their darkest prophecies— the hysteria of the South Sea Bubble having done nothing to lessen their fears. From stand­ ing armies to stockjobbers, therefore, the vocabulary of the Country ideology remained valid after half a century’s shaping, and though W alpole’s was a resolutely peace-seeking administration, Bolingbroke and Pulteney in their journal The Craftsman, supported b y writers of the caliber of Pope, Sw ift, G ay, Arbuthnot, and Fielding, were able to attack it in the language used against the warmaking Juntos of W illiam and Anne’s reigns and to represent it as their historical successor and continuation. Th e function of every Country ideology was to mobilize country gentlemen and their independent representatives in parliament against the administration of the day, and the rhetoric of virtue employed to this end was invariably as much constitutional as it was moral. This characteristic, o f course, kept it well within the classical mainstream. W e know that the Aristotelian polity, the ultimate paradigm of all civic humanism, was simultaneously a distribution of political functions and 49 Kramnick’s is the best study of the thought of these controversies; H. T . Dickinson, Bolingbroke (London: Constable, 1970), relates them most fully to the pattern of Bolingbroke’s career. 50 The term is of course that of J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England> 1660-1730 (London: Macmillan, 1967).

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powers and a partnership between many kinds of virtue, and that virtus and virtu had themselves been used to convey the notion of power as well as that of moral quality. Bolingbroke, like all ideologists in the Country tradition, exploited this ambivalence in attempting to solve his basic problem of accepting the constitutional implications of the G lori­ ous Revolution of 1688 while passionately rejecting the allegedly cor­ ruptive consequences of the Financial Revolution that had inseparably attended it; and did so by means that in their turn looked back to the central ambivalence of the K ing's A nsw er to the N ineteen Proposi­ tions. That document, authoritatively formulating the doctrine that England enjoyed a balanced constitution, had left it unavoidably unclear whether king, lords, and commons— standing for the classical one, few , and many— formed a partnership and equilibrium within the process of legislation, a partnership of different functions and powers within some more broadly defined process of government, or a partner­ ship of different social virtues within a politeia or res publica. As we know, it was only when the concept of legislation assumed a high degree of importance that it was really necessary to draw distinctions between these possible meanings. E ver since Shaftesbury had pioneered the attack on the Crown and its servants for corrupting the House of Commons, this had been capa­ ble of rhetorical expression as an attack on “ the executive” (or “ minis­ ters” ) for seeking to bring “ the legislative” (or “ representative” ) into dependence or subjection, thus disturbing “ the balance” with conse­ quences potentially as grave as those of 1642; but the underlying ambiguities had remained. W henever a conflict had seemed to occur between prerogative and parliament, the language of balance had been used in its functional sense, and the offending party had been denounced for usurping a jurisdiction not properly its own. But when­ ever— as was increasingly common— patronage and corruption were the issue, the executive had been attacked less for exceeding its consti­ tutional powers than for bringing the individuals composing the legis­ lature into a personal and demoralizing dependence on the Crown and the financial resources it controlled. W hile this was, in an important sense, to move from the language of function to that of virtue, the two had never been distinct and tended to coalesce. Even the rise of the “ monied interest,” depicted in sweeping historical terms as that of a “ new form of property,” was thought of as increasing “ the influence of the Crow n” b y vastly enlarging the number and wealth of its dependents. A corollary, however, was that threats to the balance of the constitution and increases in the power of the executive were thought to entail the terrifying social and moral threats we have con­ sidered. T o disturb the balance was, as ever, to corrupt virtue. 479

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One of Bolingbroke’s more arresting hypotheses about modern his­ tory was that the danger from prerogative had been virtually replaced by the danger from corruption51— an argument at bottom neo-Harring­ tonian— but he nevertheless continued to conflate the languages of func­ tion and morality in w ays which may have affected the thought of Montesquieu and through him, of the American Founding Fathers. This is the famous problem of the “ separation of powers.” 52 Boling­ broke at times used terminology which seemed to suggest that king, lords, and commons performed separate political functions which could be distinguished as executive, judicial, and legislative, that the balance of the constitution consisted in the ability of any two of these to check the third, and that since it was vital to prevent any one o f them from establishing a permanent ascendancy over any other, the “ independ­ ence” of each of the three must at all costs be preserved. In spite of the many difficulties of this analysis when applied to British government, it m ay have been at Bolingbroke’s persuasion that Montesquieu53 sub­ stituted the triad of executive, judicial, and legislative for that duality of functions proper to a few and a many— Guicciardini’s deliberazione and approvazione, Harrington’s “ debate” and “ result” — which theorists of the philo-Venetian tradition had insisted must be kept apart, thus constituting a “ separation of powers” in the strict sense. Bolingbroke was prom ptly attacked b y his journalistic adversaries— obscure men whose ability has been much underrated— for advancing a chimerical theory of the constitution, and he as promptly conceded that British government could not be analyzed into these absolutely distinct pow ­ ers. He acknowledged that king, lords, and commons joined in a com­ mon political activity, which might as well be termed legislation as government, and insisted that by “ independence” he had meant not a rigorous separation of function, but the elimination of “ any influence, direct or indirect,” which one of the three might exercise over any other.54 Unless the argument were to go round in a circle again— which it often did and still does— Bolingbroke must be interpreted as mean­ ing, not encroachment by one jurisdiction upon another, but corrup­ tion occurring when “ indirect influence” made the members of one 51 This is the argument at large of A Dissertation Upon Parties ( 1733- 35). 52 W . B. Gwyn, The Meaning of the Separation of Powers: an analysis of the doctrine from its origin to the adoption of the United States Constitution (New Orleans: Tulane Studies in Political Science, 1965), and M .J.C. Vile, Constitution­ alism and the Separation of Powers (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967), are two thorough if slightly unhistorical treatments of this concept. 53 Robert Shackleton, “Montesquieu, Bolingbroke and the Separation of Pow­ ers,” French Studies 3 (1949), 25-38, and Montesquieu: a Critical Biography (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1961). 54 Dickinson, pp. 202-204, 305-3°6-

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governing body personally dependent upon another; as talking, not the language of function, but that of morality. There is plenty of evi­ dence that his contemporaries so understood him. But the ambivalence could not be quite so easily dispelled. In argu­ ing that government by three independent powers was absurd, Boling­ broke’s critics were not simply returning to the sixteenth- or seven­ teenth-century debate between sovereignty and mixed government, though they were echoing a line of argument, found at least as early as S w ift’s Discourse o f the N obles and the Commons, in which it was maintained that in every government there must be a final, absolute, and uncontrollable power, but that this could well be exercised by a complex and concurrent body (like king-in-parliament). T h e y were in fact returning to the position of the A n sw er to the N ineteen Propo­ sitions or the H um ble Petition and A d v ic e , according to which the principles of balanced government could be found within the structure of parliamentary mixed monarchy, and against which Harrington had contended that a true republic was necessary. Montesquieu, it should be noted, for all his separation of powers, virtually accepted their posi­ tion when he declared that Harrington had erected an imaginary gov­ ernment while having before his eyes a real one containing everything he needed.55 But in addition to this, Bolingbroke’s critics were affirming something at which Plato R edivivus had at least hinted and which Cato's Letters had acknowledged more directly: that parliamentary monarchy, in which king, lords, and commons must w ork together, could not subsist without a measure of patronage or “ indirect influ­ ence.” The neo-Harringtonian restatement of English history could be used to make this point: in feudal society, homage and tenure had com­ bined to ensure that free men were responsive to the authority of their superiors, but once property carried with it no element of subjection at all, something must take the place of the vanished liens de dependance. Trenchard may have hoped that a true equality of property would some day make even mixed monarchy unnecessary, but there is a group of works of the 1740s56 concerned with rendering perma­ nent a structure o f influence which has come to replace feudal tenure. Such was a recognized implication of the acceptance of the need for parliamentary sovereignty. Donato Giannotti would have followed this part of the debate with 55 Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, xi, 6: “ . . . il a bad Chalcedoine, ayant le rivage de Byzance devant les yeux.” 56 A Letter from a Bystander to a Member of Parliament ( 1741 ); Earl of Egmont, Faction Detected by the Evidence of Facts ( 1743); Bishop Samuel Squire, A n Enquiry into the Foundation of the English Constitution ( 1745), and A Historical Essay upon the Balance of Civil Power in England ( 1748).

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interest, recalling his own attempts to invest one of the three com­ ponents of government with poca dependenza upon the other two; even Bolingbroke once or twice confessed that a subordination, as well as a balance, of powers was necessary to maintain government in an imperfect w orld.57 Under eighteenth-century conditions, however, it was even harder than it had been in Florence to show that dependence and influence could mean anything but corruption. The man who lived in the expectation of reward for his civic actions was a creature of passion, not of virtue, and by definition lacked the quality necessary to resist further degeneration. Bolingbroke, therefore, on weak ground when it came to eliminating patronage altogether from politics, was driven to find more and more devices for the reaffirmation of virtue. Hence his retention of such staples of the Country program as fre­ quent, instead of septennial, parliaments and the abolition of placemen and standing armies. It is plain also that one motive for his stress on the independence of the three parts of government was the desire to affirm the classical balance in as formulaic a w ay as possible, and so invest the constitution with “ principles” to which there might be a “ return” — that most Renaissance of means to the reassertion of virtue. Even about this he displayed ambivalence in his later writings,58 but in the Crafts­ man period he made the historical reality of principles a cardinal doc­ trine, and drew heavily on the idealization of “ Gothic” society in order to discover a structure of balance in the Ancient Constitution. But here too his critics— Cook and Arnall in the London Journal, Lord H ervey in A ncient and M odern Liberty Stated and Compared— pressed hard upon him, demonstrating in the tradition of Brady and Defoe that there 57 Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism, on the Idea of a Patriot K ing, and on the State of Parties at the Accession of George the First (London, 1749), p. 45: “ . . . powers, necessary to maintain subordination, and to carry on even good govern­ ment, and therefore necessary to be preserved in the crown, notwithstanding the abuse that is sometimes made of them; for no human institution can arrive at perfection, and the most that human wisdom can do, is to procure the same or greater good, at the expence of less evil.” The language, which is Machiavellian, appears to allude to prerogative, not influence as suggested by Dickinson, p. 345. Cf. Letters, p. 93: “There must be an absolute, unlimited and uncontroulable power lodged somewhere in every government,” but this power is legislative, and is lodged in king, lords and commons jointly. 58 Letters, p. 77 (On the Idea of a Patriot K ing): “ M y intention is not to intro­ duce what I have to say concerning the duties of kings, by any nice inquiry into the original of their institution. What is to be known of it will appear plainly enough, to such as are able and can spare time to trace it, in the broken traditions which are come down to us of a few nations. But those, who are not able to trace it there, may trace something better and more worthy to be known, in their own thoughts: I mean what this institution ought to have been, whenever it began, according to the rule of reason, founded in the common rights, and interests, of mankind.”

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had been no ancient liberty in the turbulent world of barons and vas­ sals, and consequently no principles to which to return.59 For all his superb arrogance of style, Bolingbroke in his lifetime fought a losing battle; and it does not lessen this truth to point out that the W alpolean writers proclaimed a world of kinetic history, without principles or virtue, in which men were governed through the interests and passions that made them what they were at the moment. T he dichotomy of virtue and interest also accounts for Boling­ broke’s— and very generally the age’s— inability to devise a satisfactory theory o f party. T o moderns it seems tolerably evident that competi­ tive pressure groups m ay be made to function to the overall benefit of the political system; but to the still highly Aristotelian Augustans it was far from clear how any group intent upon its private interest could have any sense of the common good at all, and if it had not it would be no more than a faction, driving its members to further and further excesses of greed and frenzy and robbing them of that virtue, or sense of the common good, which only individuals, not groups, could pos­ sess. In societies like Machiavellian Rome, where the relations between the orders were im properly worked out, there might with advantage be conflicting parties embodying the virtues, or “ principles,” of the nobility or the people; and where the commonwealth itself was threat­ ened, there might (in Ciceronian language) be a party of good men who stood for it, a faction of bad men who were against it.60 Boling­ broke argued that the terms W hig and T o ry were now obsolete, and that there was only the Country, or party o f virtue, contending against the Court, or faction o f corruption; but this was not essentially differ­ ent from the arguments of Toland and others in 1714 , when— after years of denouncing party as an instrument of corruptive rule— they had conceded that there were still W higs, who upheld the principles o f 1688, and Tories, who could not be trusted to do so, and that a strong executive founded upon a Septennial A ct was therefore necessary.61 Party was for most men tolerable only when it embodied 59Kramnick, pp. 127-37. 60 There is now a considerable literature on the idea of party in the eighteenth century. See among others, H arvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Statesmanship and Party Government (Chicago University Press, 1965); Kurt Kluxen, Das Problem der Politischen Opposition: Entvoicklung und Wesen der englischen Zweiparteienpolitik im 18 Jahrhundert (Freiburg and Munich, 1956); Richard C. Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1969); J.A .W . Gunn, Factions N o M ore: Attitudes to Party in Government and Opposition in Eighteenth-century England (London: Frank Cass, 1972). 61 Compare Toland’s The A rt of Governing by Parties (1701) with his The State-Anatomy of Great Britain (1714 ). The two positions are not irreconcilable:

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principle and so was capable of virtue; two parties representing dif­ ferent particular interests would perpetuate the reign of corruption and Bolingbroke once remarked that the relation of stockjobbing to trade was much the same as that of faction to liberty62 (the obvious Polybian comment would be that the good and bad aspects of any “ virtue” were always hard to keep separate). The apophthegm reveals the dominance and the limitations of the ideal of virtue; it remained a public and a personal characteristic, a devotion of the self to the universal good, in one form or another, which only a highly autonomous self could per­ form. Politics must be reduced to ethics if it was not to reduce itself to corruption; the rhetoric of the classical style commanded this, irre­ spective of the sincerity with which Bolingbroke or any other employed it. Therefore the Aristotelian, Polybian, Machiavellian, and now Harringtonian “ science of virtue,” or sociology of civic ethics, had to be restated with paradigmatic force and comprehensiveness for the eighteenth-century W est at large. Montesquieu, seen from this angle, is the greatest practitioner of that science, and this is the period during which Machiavelli’s reputation as the chief of civic moralists stood at its highest and blanketed most references to his moral ambi­ guity. But the price to be paid was that every treatise on politics which could not transcend the limitations of this style was likely to end, not only in moral exhortation, but in the suggestion that virtue as a quality of the personality was the only agency likely to cure corruption. Machiavelli had taken this line, while conceding that individual virtue in a corrupt society faced a task so difficult that m erely human actors would almost certainly be defeated b y it; only the heroic, the quasi­ divine or the truly inspired might succeed. Bolingbroke’s later writings, especially those written after he failed to w reck W alpole, are mere exhortations to the leaders of society, and finally to the Patriot King, to display heroic virtue and redeem a corrupt world; and John Brown, a highly intelligent if tragically unstable63 disciple of Machiavelli, Cato, Bolingbroke, and Montesquieu who wrote between 1757 and 1765, reached at the end of his best-known w ork the unexpected conclusion that the national decadence could be cured only b y the moral example in the first it is bad that there should be parties; in the second bad men have formed a party and good men must associate to resist it. 62 Remarks on the History of England, Letter xiv (2d ed., London, 1747, p. 169). 63 For his life see D.N.B. He ended as a suicide, though, as an ordained clergy­ man, he had written against that act as a sin.

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of “ some great minister.1’64 Bolingbroke has been criticized for this retreat from Harringtonian empirical materialism to Machiavellian moral idealism;65 but, in the first place, a civic virtue which was a dedication to universal public good must sooner or later be seen as independent o f contingent and particular social causes, and in the sec­ ond, it was no longer possible to believe with Harrington that an agrarian law might equalize in perpetuity the distribution of the mate­ rial foundations of virtue. Land could not be freed from its depend­ ence on trade, or trade from its dependence on credit; and the equiva­ lent o f an agrarian law for a speculative society was unknown and perhaps unthinkable. Men had therefore to be better than their circum­ stances; Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois is a magnificently paradoxical attempt to discover the circumstances under which this may be possible. That Bolingbroke was driven to stake his intellectual and rhetorical all on the concept of virtue has consequences o f which the most recent interpreters of his thought have perhaps not taken the fullest possible account. Observing that he differed— fairly explicitly— from Locke in holding that there were natural authority and order in society, that a virtuous king or aristocracy might exercise a paternal authority over lesser men, and that a Great Chain of Being formed the unifying struc­ ture of the deist’s universe, they have concluded that his ultimate allegiance was to the leadership of the landed gentry in a naturally hierarchical society, and that he felt a nostalgia for an older, Eliza­ bethan or Jacobean, social and philosophical w orld.66 But we have repeatedly seen that the ideal of virtue was political, and that the polis, based on the vita activa and including equality among its principles, was never finally reducible to the hierarchy. Certainly it included an elite, characterized b y wisdom and experience, leisure and property, whose virtue was to lead and in that sense to rule; the authority these exercised over citizens not of the elite might be termed both natural and paternal, as the Roman senate had been termed patres conscripti; but Guicciardini, the most aristocratically minded o f Florentine repub­ lican theorists,7 had made it clear that the few needed the many to save j them from corruption, and that when the many accepted the few as their natural leaders they did not cease to display critical judgment or active citizenship. Leadership and deference were both active virtues; virtue, in a more abstract and formal sense, was a relationship between 64 John Brown, Essay on the Manners and Principles of the Times (London, 1757), the closing words. The elder Pitt may have been the person intended. 65 Kramnick, pp. 166-69; Dickinson, pp. 256-65. 66Kramnick, pp. 76-83, 88-110, 261-65; Dickinson, pp. 22-24, 162-72, 119, 206-209, 300-302. The term “nostalgia” is taken from Kramnick’s subtitle.

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two modes of civic activity; and Bolingbroke’s nostalgia, if he felt any, might well have been for the open and turbulent world of Country politics in Anne’s reign, as compared with the placidly managed oli­ garchy o f George II’s. W e shall return to this theme in analyzing the problems of deference and equality in revolutionary America, where he was regarded as a second Machiavelli whose authority as a philoso­ pher of morals and politics exceeded his ambiguity. [iv] The “ Machiavellian moment” of the eighteenth century, like that of the sixteenth, confronted civic virtue with corruption, and saw the latter in terms of a chaos of appetites, productive of dependence and loss o f personal autonomy, flourishing in a world of rapid and irrational change. But to sixteenth-century minds the symbol for that which made the appetites hard to coordinate in sw iftly moving secular time was fortuna, a concept essentially expressing the inadequacies of classi­ cal epistemology; whereas those of the eighteenth century were able to define corruption and irrationality in terms far more positive, material, and dynamic, though these still lacked an ethical content to the point where the history they rendered concrete remained essentially a move­ ment aw ay from virtue. W hat may be termed the ideology of the Country was founded on a presumption of real property and an ethos of the civic life, in which the ego knew and loved itself in its relation to a patria, res publica or common good, organized as a polity, but was perpetually threatened b y corruption operating through private appe­ tites and false consciousness. T o save personality, it urged an ideal of virtue which at times reached unreally Stoical heights of moral auton­ om y, and was based on the maintenance of a propertied independence hard to sustain in a speculative economy; to save polity, it depicted the British constitution as a classical balance of independent yet coordinate elements or powers, to maintain which was to maintain virtue but which only the assertion of personal virtue could in the last analysis maintain. Since its ethics were reducible to an ideal of the w holly self-sustaining personality, it found it terribly easy to see corruption as irreversible by m erely human means; and since its economics tended to ground that personality on a form of property held to have existed in a pre­ commercial past, it tended to see history as a movement aw ay from value which only heroic, not social, action could reverse. But though it was increasingly susceptible to elegiac pessimism, it was endowed with all the riches of the complex and articulate vocabulary of civic humanism with which to expound the science and sociology of virtue. Its paradigms therefore tended to dominate discourse.

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W hat m ay be termed the ideology of the Court, on the other hand, was consequently less prominent and had few er magisterial exponents. W e m ay synthesize it, however, as founded upon an acceptance of credit as a measure of economic value and of a psychology of imagina­ tion, passion, and interest as the mainsprings of human behavior. In the place of virtue it stressed the ego’s pursuit of satisfaction and self­ esteem, and was beginning to explore theories of how the diversities of passionate and self-interested action might be manipulated and coordi­ nated, or might magically or mechanically coordinate themselves, into promoting a common good no longer intimately connected with the inner moral life of the individual. Since it did not regard virtue as politically paradigmatic, it did not regard government as founded upon principles of virtue which needed to be regularly reasserted; it readily accepted that men were factious and interested beings and, instead of regarding these characteristics as fatal if unchecked to virtue and gov­ ernment, proposed to have them policed b y a strong central executive, which did not itself need to be disciplined b y the principles of virtue, but might without suffering harm appeal to the passions and interests of men. It saw personal morality as private rather than public, a matter of probity in interpersonal dealings which did not require to be expressed in acts of civic morality or statesmanlike virtue, and might contribute only indirectly if at all to the maintenance of a moral climate in politics. Because of this, its ethical vocabulary was thin and limited b y the lack of any theory which presented human virtue as that of a zdon politikon. This weakness relegated it to the margins— if at times to the avant-garde— of eighteenth-century moral theory; but the fact that it located no body of principles, or concept of property, in a past to which there might be return, gave it freedom to adapt itself to those so­ cial changes which rendered intelligible the new world of credit, profes­ sionalism, and empire. A t the same time, however, these changes con­ tinued to be measured in terms of history’s departure from the world and its values depicted b y the Country, and the ethics of the new world must be stated in language as intransigent as that of Mandeville. The Country took its republican ethos very largely from Machiavelli; but the Court was the more Machiavellian in its ability to accept that dynamic change might operate independently of values. T he dualism of virtue and virtu returns to view here, and we recall that, as it was largely war which had opened up this dichotomy for Machiavelli, it was in part w ar as an aspect of commerce which had compelled the Augustans to recognize the nature of the new world. In the language of Addison’s Cato rather than Trenchard’s, the Court ideology could show how to command success, the Country how to deserve it; or, as

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Alexander Hamilton once put it— in an interesting employment of party terminology that might have been used by Sw ift— “ Cato was the T o ry , Caesar the W hig of his day. . . . The former perished with the republic, the latter destroyed it.” 67 But if the Court ideology could claim a monopoly of the understanding of power, it must leave its counter-thesis in sole possession of a theory of virtue; and far more than for Machiavelli, to lack virtue was to be prey to fantasia and false consciousness. The gap between civic virtue and dynamic virtu was by that much the wider, and the charge that the road to power was the road to corruption and self-destruction the more compelling. In Britain, however, Bolingbroke’s ideological campaign was in its author’s lifetime a failure. The country gentlemen were not being reduced to hopeless indebtedness; no monopolist of power and patron­ age succeeded W alpole; the wars of the mid-century, being fought largely beyond sea, produced no revolt against war finance like that which had brought down Godolphin and Marlborough; and over all, it seemed evident enough that Court and Country were in symbiosis rather than in opposition, so that there was much to be said for the view that the constitution was a parliamentary monarchy rather than a balance of separate powers. In such circumstances there was room for political theorists to reinspect the relations of crown and parliament: historians, those of the landed and trading interests; philosophers, those of reason and passion; and all these revaluations may be found in the writings of the most powerful minds which examined British politics about 1750. Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois, in spite of its treatment of the separation of powers, m ay be thought of, in English terms, as some­ what more W hig than the Lettres Persanes; and there is, in Book xix, chapter 27, a striking study of a free nation— obviously Britain— in the terms we have been considering. Montesquieu tells us that this analysis will be based on moeurs and manieres in their relation to laws, rather than on les principes de sa constitution;68 and this proves to mean that the importance of keeping the legislative and executive powers separate and visibles is that, the passions of men being free, hatred, envy, and ambition shall be equally free to attach themselves to the one or the other.69 Since the executive power has all offices in its gift, it will always be the object of hope 67 See below, p. 529. 68 Esprit des Lois (Paris, Garnier, ed. True, n.d.), 1, 335. 69 Ibid.: “Comme il y aurait dans cet £tat deux pouvoirs visibles: la puissance legislative et l’executrice, et que tout citoyen y aurait sa volonte propre, et ferait valoir a son gre son independance, la plupart des gens auraient plus d’affection pour une de ces puissances que pour l’autre, le grand nombre n’ayant pas ordinairement assez d’equite ni de sens pour les affectionner egalement toutes les deux.”

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rather than fear; those who are out of office will hope to return to it, and those who are in, though presumably fearing loss of place, know that even in that event they may hope to regain office in the w ay that they won it. T he problem of Machiavellian innovation— that those it offends will react more dynamically than those it pleases— has to this extent been solved, and the executive power resembles the principe naturale, whose position is reinforced by the natures of his subjects, rather than the principe nuovo, doomed to act contrary to them. There is no doubt, however, that passion, rather than Machiavellian custom, is a mainspring of this kind of government;70 caprices and fantaisies will often lead men to change sides as between the two passionately jealous parties (o f ins and outs) into which this society will be divided; there will be little loyalty or principle among the independent particu­ lars who compose it, and the monarch will often be driven to disgrace his friends and promote his enemies.71 But because passions are free, amour propre (in Rousseau’s phrase, which Montesquieu does not use) will not become corruptive. Fear, and irrational fear at that, now makes a reappearance; the m onopoly of patronage b y the executive keeps the people in perpetual fear of they know not what, and the leaders of opposition to the Crown will m agnify these fears rather than avow their own motives.72 But the emotion is healthy; Montesquieu is mid­ w ay between Cato’s citation of Machiavelli to the effect that a people mistrusting its government knows no limits to its fears, and Burke’s observation of the Americans that “ they snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.” 73 Because they fear unreal dangers to their 70 lbid.\ “Toutes les passions y etant libres, la haine, l’envie, la jalousie, l’ardeur de s’enrichir et de se distinguer, paraitraient dans toute leur etendue. . . 71 Esprit, pp. 335-36: “ Comme chaque particulier, toujours independant, suivrait beaucoup ses caprices et ses fantaisies, on changerait souvent de parti; on en abandonnerait un ou l’on laisserait tous ses amis pour se lier a un autre dans lequel on trouverait tous ses ennemis; et souvent, dans cette nation, on pourrait oublier les lois de l’amitie et celles de la haine. “Le monarque serait dans le cas des particuliers; et, contre les maximes ordinaires de la prudence, il serait souvent oblige de donner sa confiance a ceux qui l’auraient le plus choque, et de disgracier ceux qui l’auraient le mieux servi, faisant par necessite ce que les autres princes font par chois.” The allusion could very well be to the reign of William III in England. 72 P. 336: “ On craint de voir echapper un bien que Ton sent, que Ton ne connait guere, et qu’on peut nous deguiser; et la crainte grossit toujours les objets. Le peuple serait inquiet sur sa situation, et croirait etre en danger dans les moments meme les plus surs. “D ’autant mieux que ceux qui s’opposeraient le plus vivement a la puissance executrice, ne pouvant avouer les motifs interesses de leur opposition, ils augmenteraient les terreurs du peuple, qui ne saurait jamais au juste s’il serait en danger ou non.” 73 In the Speech on Conciliation in Works, 11, 125.

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liberty, they are alert to real ones before these arise74— to wait until experience has revealed them to be real is to delay until it is too late— and the elected legislature, being calmer than the people and having their confidence,75 will allay their fears of unreal dangers and antici­ pate the rise of real ones; a role, it is worth noting, which only a few can play. This nation, situated on an island, will engage in commerce rather than conquest; but its trading and colonizing ventures will be fiercely competitive and aggressive, it will engage in enterprises beyond its strength and even contrary to its interests,76 and in order to do so will mobilize huge and fictitious power b y borrowing. But since it borrows from itself, its credit is sure; and though the wealth and power it creates are imaginary, its confiance in itself and its free government will con­ vert fiction into reality.77 N othing could be further from Cato’s por­ trait of the South Sea mania, or Montesquieu’s own portrait of Law . He is now telling us that in a free society, where power is pluralized and distributed, passion itself is free, not merely to change its objects, but actually to recreate the world in accordance with its fantasies. This, however, operates in the domain of external virtu, of commerce and power beyond the frontiers and seacoasts; in the domain of civic virtue, fantasy and truth may coexist and reinforce one another, but there comes a point where prudence and wisdom must rigorously distinguish between the real and unreal as threats to liberty. Given liberty, how ­ ever— which was lacking in the case of L aw — passion and fantasy will contribute to this result; they will fuel the fires by whose light states­ men discern, and w e are not in Plato’s cave. Montesquieu is not argu74 Esprit, loc. cit.\ “ Ainsi, quand les terreurs imprimees n’auraient point d’objet certain, elles ne produiraient que de vaines clameurs et des injures: et elles auraient meme ce bon effet qu’elles tendraient tous les ressorts du gouvernement, et rendraient tous les citoyens attentifs. Mais si elles naissaient a 1’occasion du renversement des lois fondamentales, elles seraient sourdes, funestes, atroces, et pro­ duiraient des catastrophes.” 75 Ibid.: . . ayant la confiance du peuple, et etant plus eclaire que lui . . 76 Ibid., p. 337: “Cette nation, toujours echauffee, pourrait plus aisement etre conduite par ses passions que par la raison, qui ne produit jamais de grands efTets sur lesprit des hommes; et il facile a ceux qui la gouverneraient de lui faire faire des entreprises contre ses veritables interets. “ Cette nation aimerait prodigieusement sa liberte, parce que cette liberte serait vraie; et il pourrait arriver que, pour la defendre, elle sacrifierait son bien, son aisance, ses interets; qu’elle se chargerait des impots les plus durs, et tels que le prince le plus absolu n’oserait les faire supporter a ses sujets.” 77 Ibid.: “Elle aurait un credit sur, parce qu’elle emprunterait a elle-meme, et se paierait elle-meme. II pourrait arriver qu’elle entreprendrait au-dessus de ses forces naturelles, et ferait valoir contre ses ennemis d’immenses richesses de fiction, que la confiance et la nature de son gouvernement rendraient reelles.” 4 90

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ing here, as Sw ift, Cato, and Bolingbroke had argued, that a wisdom not grounded in commerce is needed to prevent the fantasies of specu­ lation from corrupting society. He is saying that a free and fortunate society can absorb a great deal of false consciousness without suffering serious harm, and m ay use it in order to expand. The frenzies of his ins and outs, his office seekers, speculators, and aggressive merchants, recall those hatreds of the patricians and plebeians which Machiavelli con­ tended had contributed to Roman liberty and greatness. There m ay be found in Montesquieu— standing somewhat apart from his studies of British politics— a historical conspectus of the w ays in which commerce, and therefore passion, contribute to liberty and civic values. Virtue, he laid down, was the principle o f republics, but by this he intended a vertu politique, not identical (though not incom­ patible) with a vertu morale or a vertu chretienne, and consisting— true to the Machiavellian tradition— in an equality of subjection to the republic’s laws and of devotion to her good.78 More clearly than his English predecessors, Montesquieu knew that virtue in this sense did not necessarily coincide with private values or personal morality; and in his treatment of early Sparta, Athens, and Rome he made it clear that the republic might enforce it with repugnant and inhuman harshness.79 Like Machiavelli, he knew that the Christian ethos made demands to which the civic ethos might refuse to give w ay, and that the latter might flourish best in periods close to barbarism, when there was no need to accord the rights of humanity to those who were not of one’s city. But he also makes it clear that it was because the ethos of the ancient cities was essentially a warrior ethos, and commerce and even agriculture were despised, that Plato and Aristotle believed the person78 Esprit, p. 4 (“Avertissement de 1’Auteur” ): “ . . . ce que j’appelle la vertu dans la republique est Famour de la patrie, c’est-a-dire Famour de l’egalite. Ce n’est point une vertu morale, ni une vertu chretienne, c’est la vertu politique; et celle-ci est le ressort qui fait mouvoir le gouvernement republicain, comme l’honneur est le ressort qui fait mouvoir la monarchic. J ’ai done appele vertu politique Famour de la patrie et de l’egalite. J ’ai eu des idees nouvelles; il a bien fallu trouver de nouveaux mots, ou donner aux anciens de nouvelles acceptations. . . . “Enfin, Fhomme de bien dont il est question dans le livre III, chapitre V , n’est pas Fhomme de bien chretien mais Fhomme de bien politique, qui a la vertu politique dont j’ai parle. C ’est Fhomme qui aime les lois de son pays, et qui agit par Famour des lois de son pays. J ’ai donne un nouveau jour a toutes ces choses dans cette edition-ci, en fixant encore plus les idees; et, dans la plupart des endroits ou je me suis servi du mot de vertu, j’ai mis vertu politique 79 E.g., Book iv, ch. 6: Book v, ch. 19: “ On est surpris que l’Areopage ait fait mourir un enfant qui avait creve les yeux a son oiseau. Qu’on fasse attention qu’il s’agit point la d’une condamnation pour crime, mais d’un jugement de moeurs dans une republique fonde sur les moeurs.” 491

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ality could and must be entirely reshaped b y music.80 That is, men who produce and exchange goods become aware of values which are not merely those of the city ’s laws, and enter into relations with one another that do not consist exclusively in an equality of subjection to them. If they trade outside the city’s walls, they enter into human rela­ tions and develop codes of humane values over which the republic has only a contingent authority. On the one hand, manners are now sof­ tened, art and refinement can be developed, and the ferocity o f Lycurgan or Draconian discipline can be mitigated; but on the other, this is the point at which Plato found it necessary to prohibit com­ merce outside the city and leave the socialization of the personality entirely to music and other modes of education controlled b y the guardians. Commerce is the source of all social values save one— we sense that Christianity itself would be possible only in a world of intercivic contacts, an oikumene rather than a polis— but that one, the vertu politique, is that which makes man a zdon politikon and consequently human; and there is a radical disjunction between the two categories of value. Commerce, which makes men cultured, entails luxury, which makes them corrupt;81 there is no economic law which sets limits to the growth of luxury, and virtue is to be preserved only b y the disci­ pline of the republic, educating men in frugality— which indeed is con­ ducive to further commercial grow th— by means which include both music and the practice of arms. Machiavelli, defining civic values as ultimately incompatible with Christian, had employed the concept of arms to express both the citi­ zen’s total devotion to his republic and the notion of a world too harsh in its treatment of noncitizens to profess any universal humanity. Mon­ tesquieu had added to this the concept of commerce, and had restored the conclusion, hinted at by Fletcher and Davenant, that commerce and culture were incompatible with virtue and liberty. Commerce brought with it pleasures more lively, perceptions more refined, and 80 Book iv, ch. 8. 81 Book xx, ch. i (Garnier, ed., n, 8): “Le commerce guerit des prejuges destructeurs; et c’est presque une regie generale, que partout ou il y a des moeurs douces, il y a du commerce; et que partout ou il y a du commerce, il y a des moeurs douces. “ Qu’on ne s’etonne done point si nos moeurs sont moins feroces qu’elles ne l’etaient autrefois. Le commerce a fait que la connaissance des moeurs de toutes les nations a penetre partout: on les a comparees entre elles, et il en a resulte de grands biens. “ On peut dire que des lois du commerce perfectionnent les moeurs, par la meme raison que ces memes lois perdent les moeurs. Le commerce corrompt les moeurs pures: e’etait le sujet des plaintes de Platon: il polit et adoucit les moeurs barbares, comme nous le voyons tous les jours.” 492

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values more universal than those of the primeval Spartan, Roman, or Gothic citizen-warrior; but because it represented a principle more universal, and of another order, than that of the finite polis, it was ulti­ mately incompatible with virtue in the sense of vertu politique, and though laws, education, and manners might be devised that would check the grow th of luxury, it could never be less than equally true that luxury corrupted laws, education, and manners. In the inter­ mediate perspective, commerce and the arts could be seen as contribut­ ing to sociability and even to liberty and virtue, just as it was possible to establish a positive relationship between passion and reason; but the ultimate incompatibility remained. Commerce had taken the place of fortune; the republic could not control its own history forever or resist its own corruption; the particular and the universal remained at war. It was possible at this point to restate the vision of history as an anakukldsis, in which republics were transformed into empires by their own virtu and then corrupted and destroyed b y the subsequent luxury. But to the eighteenth century, highly confident in its own culture, the intermediate perspective could seem of a surpassing importance, more positively fortified than the saeculum or historic present of Christian thought, and the moment of corruption more remote than the tribula­ tions of the Christian apocalypse; there was even, contained in theories of progress, the possibility of a utopia in which culture should become self-sustaining. But as long as the ethos of civic virtue persisted, the threat of an apocalypse of self-destruction could not be eliminated; and the relations between personality and society seemed fragile enough to leave it possible that apocalypse b y corruption might come sw iftly and irresistibly. Such perspectives can be found even in the thought of David Hume. It might well be imprudent to draw too close a connection— though a connection of some kind must exist— between the concern which Hume felt as a philosopher with the relation of reason to passion and the interest which he displayed as a historian of England in the rela­ tions of land to commerce and of executive to legislative.82 In the lat­ ter capacity, however, he appears as a historian predominantly of the Court persuasion. He followed Brady, Defoe, and the apologists for W alpole in rejecting the belief in an Ancient Constitution, and adopted the perspective of Harrington— whom he admired with reservations— against that of the neo-Harringtonians. There had been in England a Gothic government of landed warriors, barons, and their vassals, but this had been an uneasy tension between violent authority and violent 82 For this caution see Duncan Forbes, “Politics and History in David Hume” (review article on Giarrizzo’s Hume politico e storico), The Historical Journal 6, no. 2 (1963), 280-94.

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liberty; no legitimizing principles, whether of precedent or balance, were to be found in it. T he emancipation of the people from vassalage would have been impossible without the spread of commerce and of learning; but it had brought about a confrontation between a monarchy whose arbitrary and indeed absolute character stood revealed for the first time, and a people whose demand for liberty was fueled in no small measure by the superstition, fanaticism, and hypocrisy which were all Hume could discern in Puritanism. There were therefore con­ nections between the growth of commerce, the release of passion, and the pursuit of liberty, and since the latter was not at bottom a rational but an appetitive demand, it is the easier to understand Hum e’s dictum that authority and liberty must always confront one another in govern­ ment and could never be w holly harmonized. Gothic government had stated this opposition in a form exceptionally crude; what had been achieved b y 1688 was a synthesis somewhat more stable.83 It should be stressed, however, that Hume continued to regard the British constitu­ tion as a compromise between absolute monarchy and popular republic, and rated high the chances that it would gravitate toward one extreme or the other in the end.84 Commerce and learning, he made clear, had effected more than a trivial transition from the superstition of medieval Christians to the fanaticism of the Puritans. T h ey had enlarged men’s ideas b y giving them more objects to feed upon, more concepts to entertain and more values to express; and in this w ay what was at bottom an increase in the appetitive and passional activities of the human mind had facilitated a grow th in the rational capacities, including— once the frenzy of Puri­ tanism was worked out— the capacities for rational liberty and (if there could be such a thing) rational religion.85 Passion might inform reason, and help it rearrange the delicate relations between authority and lib­ erty, but just as there could be no final harmony between the one pair, there could be none between the other; and it comes as no surprise to learn that Hum e’s view of the eighteenth-century constitution was “ Court” in the sense that he accepted the necessity of an ultimate repository of power and an executive possessed of the means of infiu83 The best recent studies of Hume’s historical thinking are those of Giuseppe Giarrizzo, op.cit. (Turin: Einaudi, 1962) and Duncan Forbes in his introduction to the Pelican Classics edition of The History of Great Britain, Volume One, containing the Reigns of James I and Charles /, originally published in 1754 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970). 84 Essays Moral, Political and Literary of David Hume (W orld’s Classics edi­ tion, London: Grant Richards, 1903), no. 7: “Whether the British Government inclines more to Absolute Monarchy or to a Republic” (pp. 48-53). 85 Essays, Part 11, nos. 1 (“ Of Commerce” ) and 2 (“ Of Refinement in the Arts” ). 494

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encing the legislature.86 Patronage did not alarm him, since he saw men as creatures ruled by, or rather through, their passions, and government as a filtering device which induced them to transform their short-term perceptions of their private interests into long-term understanding of the general identity of interests— and, in that sense, of the public good. Ideally, a perfect commonwealth would consist of a one, few, and many of the classic type; but in reality, and even in ideality, there must be means of bringing the interests of all three into identity, and this involved the presence of a patronage-dispensing authority, which must always be in some degree of tension with the forces making for liberty.87 Hume accepted the necessity for patronage and influence in govern­ ment in the same w ay that he had accepted commerce as, for the pres­ ent era in history, a liberating force which enlarged men’s minds through the nourishment of their appetites. It is of interest, at this point, to recall G oro Dati and those other writers of the quattrocento, who had argued that the Florentines were the more fitted for active citizen­ ship b y the fact that they were merchants, who traveled, studied and compared, and filled their minds with more knowledge than they could have inherited through the simple observance of custom.88 In the hands of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, we realize, the civic ethos had to some extent turned against this original bourgeois ebullience; the citizen was required to subject particular to public goods so rigorously that he had begun to appear a trade-eschewing Spartan, a warrior, citizen, and farmer, and nothing more. In the eighteenth century, engrossed as it was with the problem of virtue and commerce, it was always from the Court perspective that entrepreneurial man was readmitted to the cate­ go ry of virtuous citizen. As Hume was prepared to accept duality and creative tension between reason and passion, authority and liberty, so in his treatment of English history he had begun— anticipating Cole­ ridge and others of the nineteenth century— to accept a similar duality between the men of real property, who inherited liberty in the form of privilege and custom, and the men of mobile property, who affirmed it in the form of enlarged knowledge and expanding capacities; there was beginning to be an element of progress to pit against an element of conservation.89 There were soon to appear enthusiasts— as Hume would assuredly have recognized them to be— of progress, who held that the expansion 86 Essays, Part i, no. 6, “ Of the Independency of Parliament.” 87 Essays, Part i, no. 3, “That Politics May be Reduced to a Science” ; Part 11, no. 16, “ Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth.” 88 Above, p. 91. 89 Forbes, op.cit., pp. 38-39; Giarrizzo, op.cit., chs. 11 and hi. 495

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of trade and travel over the whole world would in due course equip man with all the data, from which he would draw all the conclusions, necessary to a complete understanding of himself and his environment. The stumbling block here was that such knowledge, being based in appetite and passion, must contain an element of fantasy, imagination, and false consciousness, which it was hard to imagine being finally eliminated from the operations of the mind. Hume was certainly under no such delusions; he was no kind of utopian at all; but he had equipped himself better than most men with the skeptic’s ability to accept that, if we must live very largely in a world of phantasms, we were capable of recognizing that they were phantasms and of constructing guide­ lines which would inform us how far, and within what limits, we had succeeded in converting them into true knowledge. Consequently— and it is a consequence— he did not unduly fear the extension of metal currency into paper credit; indeed, he rather maliciously suggested that it was a pity Lycurgus had not employed paper, rather than iron bars, to restrict the circulation of gold and silver at Sparta. He accepted that, under proper management, men in a credit economy trusted one another’s solvency rather than the market value of the funds— much as Montesquieu had shown credit merging into confiance— and that paper could serve as a medium for the communication of durable, if not real, values.90 But there was a point beyond which credit and confidence could not operate, and it is striking to observe Hum e’s language when he con­ templates its being passed. The determining factor was the burden of public debt. If the time ever came when all property and industry were in debt to the nation up to the limit (nineteen shillings in the pound) to which debt could be imposed, and the nation’s debt to itself was secured upon its future revenues to all perpetuity, then public confi­ dence could no longer persist. A ruling class of stockjobbers would appear, in all the horror in which Davenant or Bolingbroke had painted them, owning nothing except the debts of the public and yet owning everything, since the value of every object would now be the extent of its indebtedness. M ilitary service and parliamentary representation would become tasks performed for hire, and men would have nothing to protect them against their own fantasies and gullibility, since the value and meaning of everything would have been destroyed. A “ natu­ ral death” of national bankruptcy, or a “ violent death” of foreign con­ quest, would be the only possible outcome; and this— Hume declared, 90Essays, Part n, nos. 3 (“Of Money” ), 4 (“Of Interest” ), 5 (“ Of the Balance of Trade” ). The reference to Lycurgus is on p. 326 of the W orld’s Classics edi­ tion. There is a recent edition of Hume's Economic Writings by Eugene Rotwein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970).

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and may have died believing in 1776— was b y far the most predictable result of the state of affairs actually existing: “ either the nation must destroy public credit, or public credit will destroy the nation.” 91 Hume was b y nature as little addicted to jeremiads as any philoso­ pher in history; yet he was driven to adopt a jeremiad tone b y the circumstance, now familiar to us, that commercial society did not con­ tain any ultimate check on the forces making for its corruption. Like the K ing's A nsw er to the Nineteen Propositions, he ended b y depicting the social balance as inherently fragile; like Machiavelli— and with as few illusions, perhaps fewer, since he had even less belief that govern­ ment rested on virtue in the individual— he conceded that only legisla­ tive reform could resist the forces undermining virtue, and that there existed a point after which degeneration would sw iftly prove irreversi­ ble. If, in Montesquieu’s language, virtue was the principle of republics, it was the inner meaning of the republican thesis that virtue must sus­ tain the conditions necessary to virtue, and was self-isolated in its own heroism— from which, perhaps, flowed its evident attraction for the post-Puritan mind. This despite the fact that Hum e’s philosophical, psychological, and economic analyses of society were as subtle and complex as any his age (or most others) had to offer, and did not oblige him to reify “ virtue” as a stable entity on which everything else depended. He had a singularly broad understanding of the diversity of social forces going to make up the complex which was usually termed “ virtue,” but he saw these forces as operating within certain conditions which they might themselves destroy; and once this happened, the established rhetoric of “ corruption” was entirely appropriate. W ithin this one limitation, however, it is part of what made Hume a great historian in the eighteenth century that he saw commerce and passion as dynamic forces contributing both to the construction of political society and to an active and kinetic history, and he was by no means incapable of taking a sanguine view of the present and future, in which ultimate corruption might be averted for a very long time. The great Scottish school of social philosophers, who are in a complex fashion his immediate heirs, continued the historical dialectic between virtue and commerce, and in doing so were greatly aided by his teachings.92 In spite of Hum e’s much-quoted belief that human nature 91 Essays, Part 11, no. 9: “ Of Public Credit” (pp. 355-61). The words last quoted are on p. 366. See also p. 371: “These seem to be the events, which are not very remote, and which reason foresees as clearly almost as she can do any thing that lies in the womb of time.” For Hume’s state of mind in the last years of his life, see Giarrizzo, o p . c i t p. no, and John B. Stewart, The Moral and Political Philoso­ phy of David Hume (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). 92 Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Enquiry of the Eighteenth 497

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was in all times and places the same, his argument that reason was dependent on passion and passion on experience could, in conjunc­ tion with the increasingly held opinion that commerce enlarged the sphere of human experience, knowledge, and values, be employed to build up an image of men creating and transforming their own “ second natures” — based, since Aristotle, on usage and love, or experience and passion— throughout the centuries of their growing economic life. If it were possible to say with certainty that the leaders of the Scottish school were acquainted with V ic o ’s doctrine that men created their own history through the linguistic and poetic imagination, it is easy to see how the link between commerce and imagination could have been made. And since land and commerce were already opposed as principles of conservation and growth, a movement of history from land toward commerce was enlarged, in the thinking of theoretical sociologists or “ conjectural historians,” into a scheme of social development which passed from hunters to shepherds, farmers, and traders, with manufac­ turers beginning to make their appearance toward the end of the sequence. In each succeeding phase, men’s methods of providing and distributing the goods necessary to life furnished experience with the raw materials on which passion, imagination, and intellect fed, and in each, human personality was seen as constructed upon the configura­ tions appropriate to that stage of culture. A theory of homo faber, of labor as the author of values, could now be invoked by Adam Smith. Man could now be described as a cultural animal and culture as a prod­ uct of economics; and as the goods produced, and the techniques of producing and distributing them, grew in each phase more complex, human culture, imagination, and personality correspondingly increased in complexity. There was now a historical science of tracing and explaining the growth of culture and commerce; and man, becoming more and more a historical animal, was placed at the core of the result­ ant process. But the contradiction between culture and liberty was not thereby fully overcome. T he Scottish and French conjectural historians con­ tinued to employ the language of virtue and corruption— to employ, that is, the language of civic humanism in that English form which since 1698 had been a means of stating the quarrel between value and history— and they did so with results that were not less pessimistic than those found in Machiavelli. T h ey came, b y the time of Adam Smith, to see the division and specialization of labor, and the resulting intensi­ fication of exchange, as the driving force which had moved society Century (Princeton University Press, 1945), is still the best one-volume study of the Scottish school.

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from each phase of its economic history toward the next; and this is not accidentally related to the circumstance that the whole AngloScottish inquiry into the role of commerce in society and history had begun as a protest against the growth of a professionalized arm y— against what the classical and civic tradition presented as the crucial and disastrous instance of specialization of social function. T he citizen who allowed another to be paid to fight for him parted with a vital element of his virtus, in every sense of that w ord; and the priest, the law yer, and the rentier had been grouped with the soldier as para­ digmatic instances of individuals whose specialization made them the servants of others who became servants to them in their turn. Spe­ cialization, in short, was a prime cause of corruption; only the citizen as amateur, propertied, independent, and willing to perform in his own person all functions essential to the polis, could be said to practice virtue or live in a city where justice was truly distributed. There was no arte that he must not be w illing to make his own. But if the arts proved to have been built up through a process of specialization, then culture itself was in contradiction with the ethos of the zoon politikon; and if it were further argued— as it clearly could be— that only specializa­ tion, commerce, and culture set men free enough to attend to the goods of others as well as their own, then it would follow that the polis was built up by the very forces that must destroy it. Once land and com­ merce were placed in historical sequence, civic man found himself existing in a historical contradiction. Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History o f Civil Society is perhaps the most Machiavellian of the Scottish disquisitions on this theme.93 He employs less the sequence of modes of production favored b y his contemporaries than a movement of history from barbarism to civiliza­ tion, from a w arrior society marked b y primitive virtue toward a state of commerce, refinement, and humanity. He stressed that the primitive human group was constantly in conflict with its neighbors, and derived from these conditions of w ar and struggle an intense passion of soli­ darity which socialized the individual and reinforced his ego.94 This aggressive and disciplined passion is visibly Machiavelli’s virtu— as it is also the ’asabiyah of the Arab sociologist Ibn Khaldun— and it is the 93 There is an edition, with introduction, by Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh Uni­ versity Press, 1966). See also David Kettler, The Social and Political Thought of Ada?n Ferguson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965). 94 Forbes, ed., p. 18: “ It is here”—i.e., in society—“that a man is made to for­ get his weakness, his cares of safety, and his subsistence; and to act from those passions which make him discover his force. It is here he finds that his arrows fly swifter than the eagle, and his weapons wound deeper than the paw of the lion, or the tooth of the boar” ; p. 59: “Athens was necessary to Sparta, in the exercise of her virtue, as steel is to flint in the production of fire” ; and pp. 59-61 generally. 499

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source of virtue in the ordinary sense, as the primitive warriors become patriotic citizens. But as war made societies more cohesive, and there­ fore more capable of refinement, relations between citizens became relations of specialization, interchange, and commerce; and the growth of professional armies marked for Ferguson— as it had for Fletcher— the moment at which men sought to enjoy the material, intellectual, and moral satisfactions of civilization and leave the defense of them to others paid for the purpose.95 This was the turning point at which it became problematical whether the contingent, secondary, yet in many scales of values higher, goods which civilization brought did not cor­ rupt men by distracting them from the primary good of sociability itself; that primeval ’asabiyah or virtu which could be described in terms predominantly nonmoral— and was now being depicted as unmis­ takably a passion— and yet was the source of moral personality and moral relationships. A ll Aristotelian theorists were in one w ay or another troubled by this problem of the universal versus the particular good, but few before Ferguson had stated it in so arrestingly primitivist a form, and the Machiavellian language which he uses indicates that his doing so is one more outcome of the humanist experiment of locating the republic in time. The problem had always been that of deciding when the particu­ lar or private goods should be seen as contributory to the universal or public good, when as competitive with it. Because the concept of civic virtue staked everything on an immediate relation between personality and republic, the vivere civile had tended to negate the secondary goods rather than to affirm them. Sparta, where the appetites had been repressed, had traditionally been preferred to Athens, where they had been transcended; it was only in nineteenth-century liberal England, when culture finally replaced property as the qualifying characteristic of the civic elite, that the Funeral Oration of Pericles was ranked among the sacred writings of liberal civilization. Once the republic was placed in time, its history tended to become one of the self-corruption of virtue b y virtue; and the eighteenth century, to which Athens appeared the type of a commercial and ultimately effeminate empire,96 95 Forbes, ed., p. 230: “The subdivision of arts and professions, in certain exam­ ples, tends to improve the practice of them, and to promote their ends. B y hav­ ing separated the arts of the clothier and the tanner, we are the better supplied with shoes and with cloth. But to separate the arts which form the citizen and the statesman, the arts of policy and war, is an attempt to dismember the human character, and to destroy those very arts we mean to improve.” Pp. 229-32, gen­ erally, and Kettler, pp. 88-91, 100-101, and passim. 96 For a typical indictment of Pericles as belonging in the same class as Caesar and Walpole, see Cato's Letters, 11, 73-74.

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faced this problem in an especially tormenting form. The paradigm of commerce presented the movement of history as being toward the indefinite multiplication of goods, and brought the whole progress of material, cultural, and moral civilization under this head. But so long as it did not contain any equivalent to the concept of the zdon politi­ kon, of the individual as an autonomous, morally and politically choos­ ing being, progress must appear to move aw ay from something essential to human personality. And this corruption was self-generating; society as an engine for the production and multiplication of goods was inher­ ently hostile to society as the moral foundation of personality. The history of commerce revealed once again that the republic had not solved the problem o f existing as a universal value in particular and contingent time. Ferguson may be thought of as stating this paradox by the device of distinguishing between virtu on the one hand— the prim ary value of oneness with the social basis of personality— and virtue, in the sense of the practice of every value derived from the progress of society, on the other. Montesquieu had done something similar when he observed that the vertu of a monk was that by which he repressed every human appe­ tite and achieved complete devotion to his order;97 the philosopher did not regard monastic orders as being of any value to society. But Fergu­ son is playing this trick on civilization and personality themselves; and the effect, given the terminology of Scottish social science, is that the citizen, the social animal defined solely by his virtue, is pressed steadily back toward the condition usually defined as savagery, in which he acknowledged no value except group solidarity, and the group made possible no other virtue. There are some extraordinary pages in which Ferguson describes the character of the early city-state Greeks in terms which assimilate them as much as possible to the Homeric warriors, w ho are in turn identified with Lafitau’s American Indians and— the implication is very clear— the clansmen of Ferguson’s own Highlands.98 If the citizen was to give up every virtue except virtu itself, he must regress more and more toward the condition of the tribesman, and his virtu toward what ethologists like to call the “ territorial imperative.” He had no alternative, given the premise— which the lack of a com­ mercial ethos forced upon the philosopher— that the progress of civili­ zation was a multiplication of secondary values, to pursue which neces­ sitated the division o f labor and the specialization of personalities. As 97 Esprit, Book v, ch. 2 (ed. True, 1, 46). Montesquieu does not actually say that the monk’s devotion is vertu, but intimates that it is what vertu is in the citizen. 98 Forbes, ed., pp. 193-202. For Ferguson as Highlander, see introduction, pp. xxxviii-ix.

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the individual pursued any civilized value or combination of values, he became more and more the dependent of those with whom he had con­ tracted to perform specialized functions other than his own, less and less a personality immediately related to society in its undifferentiated form ; and if here alone were the roots of individuality to be found, he parted with an essential component of self in proportion as he became progressively refined. The personality was impoverished even as it was enriched. W e are at the point where the classical concept of corruption merges into the modern concept of alienation, and the humanist roots of early Marxism become visible. Those theorists of the Scottish school who employ a more highly developed economic scheme of the stages of human progress exhibit the same problem. Certainly, in Adam Smith the principle of the division of labor and exchange of goods and services has been at w ork since the beginning of history; it has led, not merely to the satisfaction of more human needs, but to the development of new human capacities, wants, and aspirations, so that the personality has been progressively diversified and enriched; this is Smith’s expansion of the point that an admixture of commerce was necessary before man could become capable of citizenship. But we are aware of an intimation that some kind of optimum moment has been reached and passed. Those whose lives are spent in putting the heads on pins— the precursors of M arx’s proletariat and the assembly-line workers of the twentieth cen­ tury— are not m erely being denied the leisure to enjoy the multiplying goods now circulating in society; their actual capacity to do so is being systematically atrophied, and if specialization is producing an overall diversification of the human personality in history, it is having the reverse, one-dimensional effect upon theirs." John Millar, Smith’s most striking pupil and immediate successor, wrote a four-volume historical study of the growth of English political society in which the same point is made in terms which reveal the civic humanist origins of the whole perspective. Virtue and corruption are Millar’s organizing cate­ gories, and he recurs incessantly to the question whether, as society progresses to the point where men become capable of liberty and vir­ tue, they do not become increasingly exposed to corruption;100 not 99 The pin-makers occur in Wealth of Nations, Book i, ch. v. Cf. Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms (Adam Smith's Moral and Political Philosophy, ed. Schneider, N ew York: Hafner, 1948, pp. 320-21): “Another bad effect of commerce is that it sinks the courage of mankind, and tends to extinguish martial spirit. In all commercial countries the division of labour is infinite, and every one’s thoughts are employed about one particular thing. . . . The minds of men are contracted, and rendered incapable of elevation. Education is despised, or at least neglected, and heroic spirit is almost utterly extinguished. T o remedy these defects would be an object worthy of serious attention.” 100 John Millar, An Historical View of the English Government, from the Set-

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m erely in the sense that, once men are virtuous, they have nothing to fear except corruption, but in the deeper and more alarming sense that the same historical forces which produce virtue produce also the dis­ traction of the personality, less through the temptations of luxury than by the confusions and alienations of the moral identity, which we now intend when we use the word corruption. Questa ci esalta, questa ci disface. The virtuous, or socially healthy, personality is unmade even as it is made. In the Scottish school we may see how the Machiavellian moment became a moment in a dialectical process. There was now a theory of history which showed how virtue was built up and demolished by the growth of society itself, an extension through time of that image of the centaur which Machiavelli had employed to show how, if man was b y nature a zdon politikon, he never fully became himself; and there is a relation between Machiavelli’s belief that republics never became fully stable or fu lly virtuous, and the fact that political theory based on commerce increasingly showed society polarized into those enriched by progress and those impoverished b y it, and justified government as a necessary evil in a world of specialization and class struggle. The moment was dialectical in the sense that, though it was possible to think of an optimum point at which the forces building up and the forces tearing down virtue were in equilibrium, the historical structure of the theory ensured that such a point could only be attained momentarily. W hen Ferguson analyzed the citizen in such a w ay as to reduce him to the clansman, he knew perfectly well that the citizen could only be explained in terms of progressive emergence from the world of the clansman. Contradiction was of the essence, and there had been no golden age to which men might return. T he conversion of irrational fortuna into positive and progressive commerce had not altered the character of the moment at which virtue and fortune were held in confrontation. But there are two sides to a dialectic, especially one composed of progress and disruption, and it would clearly be possible to write a study of the Scottish school in which nearly all the emphasis lay on those aspects of their thought which were progressive, in the sense that tlement of the Saxons in Britain, to the Revolution in 1688: to which are Sub­ joined Some Dissertations Connected with the History of the Government from the Revolution to the Present Time . . . In four Volumes (4th ed., London, 1818). See in particular vols. 111 and iv; the incidental dissertations make up the last vol­ ume. W . C. Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow (Cambridge University Press, i960), has selections from Millar’s works with a critical introduction; and see Duncan Forbes, “ Scientific Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar,” Cambridge Journal 7 (1954), 643-70. 5°3

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they were concerned with showing how commerce and specialization had built up society and culture; or conservative, in the sense that they sought to show how the progress of society and the alienation of per­ sonality might be mitigated or held in an equilibrium not too intolerable for any party. Scottish thought was not as a rule utopian, in the sense that it showed the forces of progress finally overcoming those of decay— it did not have a final answer to the problem of personality and society— but neither was it strongly marked b y a tragic sense of histori­ cal contradiction. Are there perhaps concealed ironies in the use of the sobriquet “ Modern Athens” to describe Edinburgh in its great years, given the opposition between Athens and Sparta or Rome? But if we concluded that Scottish philosophy envisaged a future in which prog­ ress and corruption might coexist for a very long period, it would be important to know whether the time-dimension of that future was simply contingent and secular— in the sense that nothing was held to exist but conflicting social forces and no final resolution of their con­ flict expected— or semi-apocalyptic, in the sense that the dramatic cor­ ruption and collapse of any human society was ultimately to be looked for, but that human efforts favored b y circumstances might postpone it almost indefinitely. In either case, however, Jean-Jacques Rousseau— whose visit to Scotland, projected by Hume, was psychologically doomed never to take place— would have appeared among his hosts as an accuser of the brethren, paranoiacally proclaiming that the tensions between personality and society did have apocalyptic possibilities, that the apocalypse had arrived in his own person, and that if properly understood it would be seen to have been present since before the beginnings of human society itself. Rousseau was the Machiavelli of the eighteenth century, in the sense that he dramatically and scandalously pointed out a contradiction that others were trying to live with.101 If the Scottish school believed that the contradiction between virtue and culture might be managed b y men in society with good hopes of reasonable success, it was his role to insist that the contradiction was intolerable precisely at the moment of personal existence, and that this was and had been true at every moment in the history of society. Since b y its nature society humanized man and b y the same processes distracted and alienated him again, there was no point in past, present, or future time at which this double effect had not been going on. The entire social enterprise was b y its nature necessary and self-defeating. The impact of this declaration was in many w ays comparable to that of Machiavelli’s announcement of the 101 Judith N . Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau's Social Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1969), is by far the best exposition of his thought as belonging to the civic humanist tradition.

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divorce between civic and Christian values; and, as with Machiavelli, it took time to discern the extraordinary strength of intellect which kept Rousseau a major classical theorist in the humanist succession. He exposed the theme o f the alienation of personality with such complete­ ness that, it can be argued, no recourse was left short of the adoption o f an idealist mode of discourse in which the personality was seen articulating in itself, and seeking to reunite, the contradictions of his­ tory— a line of thought which, in Marx, was recombined with the analysis of the social effects of the division of labor begun b y the Scot­ tish theorists. That story, however, is not to be told here. T h e present study of the civic ideal of personality, and the consequences of its articulation, must conclude with its last great pre-modern efflorescence, which took place in the American colonies, and with its effects upon the Am erican sense o f personality and history.

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THE AM ERICAN IZATION OF V IR T U E Corruption, Constitution and Frontier

a number of important works of schol­ arship appeared which have sharply altered our perception of the mind of the Revolutionary generation in Am erica.1 T h e y have shown, first, that the mental processes which led to revolution involved a dras­ tic rearticulation of the language and outlook of English opposition thought; second, that through this they were, as we already know, anchored in that Aristotelian and Machiavellian tradition which this book has studied; third, that the experience of the W ar of Independ­ ence and the constitution-making which followed it necessitated a fur­ ther revision of the classical tradition, and in some respects a departure from it. The American Revolution, which to an older school o f his­ torians seemed a rationalist or naturalist breach with an old world and its history, now appears to have been involved in a complex relation both with English and Renaissance cultural history and with a tradition of thought which had from its beginnings confronted political man with his own history and was, by the time of the Revolution, being used to express an early form of the quarrel with modernity. It is now possible to explore the history of American consciousness in search of what manifestations of the problems of the republican perspective may be found there. In the first place, it has been established that a political culture took shape in the eighteenth-century colonies which possessed all the chard u r in g t h e n i n e t e e n - s i x t i e s ,

1 In addition to those of Caroline Robbins and Bernard Bailyn, cited above, ch. x ii , n. 52 and ch. x iv , n. 7, see Richard M. Gummere, The American Colonial M ind and the Classical Tradition: Essays in Comparative Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963); H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of E x­ perience: W hig History a?jd the Beginnings of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965); J. R. Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1966), and those of Gordon S. W ood and Gerald Stourzh, cited extensively below. For an earlier essay on this theme, see my “Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3, no. 1 (1972), 119-34.

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acteristics of neo-Harringtonian civic humanism. Anglophone civiliza­ tion seems indeed to present the picture of a number of variants of this culture— English, Scottish, Anglo-Irish, N ew England, Pennsylvanian, and Virginian, to look no further— distributed around the Atlantic shores. The W hig canon and the neo-Harringtonians, Milton, Harring­ ton and Sidney, Trenchard, Gordon and Bolingbroke, together with the Greek, Roman, and Renaissance masters of the tradition as far as Montesquieu, formed the authoritative literature of this culture; and its values and concepts were those with which we have grow n familiar— a civic and patriot ideal in which the personality was founded in prop­ erty, perfected in citizenship but perpetually threatened b y corruption; government figuring paradoxically as the principal source of corrup­ tion and operating through such means as patronage, faction, standing armies (opposed to the ideal of the militia), established churches (opposed to the Puritan and deist modes of Am erican religion) and the promotion of a monied interest— though the formulation of this last concept was somewhat hindered b y the keen desire for readily avail­ able paper credit common in colonies of settlement. A neoclassical poli­ tics provided both the ethos of the elites and the rhetoric of the upw ardly mobile, and accounts for the singular cultural and intellectual homogeneity of the Founding Fathers and their generation. N ot all Americans were schooled in this tradition, but there was (it would almost appear) no alternative tradition in which to be schooled. In consequence, Bailyn and others have argued, the ideology of eighteenth-century opposition acted as a restricting and compulsive force in the approaches to revolution. T he Machiavellian assumptions it contained proved to be self-actualizing. Corruption, which threat­ ened the civic bases of personality, was irremediable except b y personal virtue itself, and therefore must very soon become irreversible if action was not taken in time. W hen ministers at Westminster— the rhetoric habitually identified ministers as the source of most evils— began to take actions which seemed to encroach on colonial liberties, the appropriate language in which to denounce them was that in which the Junto W higs and W alpole had been denounced in their day; the more so as the enemies of Bute and the friends of W ilkes were already employing that language against the ministries of G eorge III. But once Americans began to talk of corruption, the situation rapidly passed out of intel­ lectual control. If corruption was being attempted from the other side of the Atlantic, the government and (it follow ed) the society attempt­ ing it must themselves be hopelessly corrupt. The virtue and personal integrity of every American were therefore threatened b y corruption emanating from a source now alien, on which Americans had formerly believed themselves securely dependent. T h e language began to sound

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that paranoiac note which is heard when men are forced b y the logic of mental restriction to conclude that malign agencies are conspiring against the inner citadels of their personalities; only diabolical con­ spiracy could account for actions each one of which appeared more blatantly subversive than the last.2 Virtue, once endangered, was com­ pelled to fall back on itself, and there was no remedy which Americans could seek short of rinnovazione and ridurre ai principii\ a return to the fundamental principles of British government or— once that was seen as containing the seeds of its own corruption— of the constitution of the commonwealth itself; an attempt to reconstitute that form of polity in which virtue would be both free and secure. T he Americans thus repeated, but in actuality, the thought-experiments of Nedham and Harrington, repudiating parliamentary monarchy in favor of an English-derived version of vivere civile; and down to this point— soon to be surpassed— the Revolution was paradigmatically determined and an essay in Kuhnian “ normal science.” But though virtue and corruption, taken by themselves, formed a closed and compulsive scheme, they could only operate as such when no other scheme was known. In Britain, as w e have seen, there existed a “ Court” ideology, less articulate and prominent than that of the “ Country,” but capable both of furnishing some effective replies to the philippics of Bolingbroke and of being enlarged b y Hume and his suc­ cessors into a complex and ambivalent historical philosophy. It was based not on a simple antithesis between virtue and commerce, but on an awareness that the two interpenetrated one another as did land and currency, authority and liberty; we have seen that as far back as 1698, the founders of “ Country” ideology admitted this truth, while drawing different conclusions from it. In Britain, moreover, Court and Country themselves were in symbiosis, and the country gentlemen never as radically independent as they liked to pretend.3 The funds, the army, and the patronage-wielding executive were facts of life, just as the property that made men virtuous derived part of its capacity to do so from the mechanisms of trade and the fluctuations of credit; and while it was hard to deny that these things exerted a corrupting influence, it was no less hard to deny that virtue must exist in the world of commerce, value in the world of an ongoing history. The political independence of the gentry consisted in their ability to affect these 2 For the growth of conspiracy theory, see Bailyn, Ideological Origins, pp. 8593, 95-102, 119-43; American Politics, pp. n -14 , 35-38, 136-49; Gordon S. W ood, Creation of the American Republic, pp. 16,22-23, 30_3^ 4°"433 Paul Lucas, “A Note on the Comparative Study of the Structure of Politics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and its American Colonies,” William a?id Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 28 (1971), 301-309.

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processes, to mitigate and limit what might otherwise corrupt their independence; and the probability of an ultimate catastrophe was offset by that o f its indefinite postponement. The doctrine of parliamentary monarchy, asserting that executive and representative had the means of coexisting while conceding that some measure of patronage was necessary to get things done, was one mode of responding to this per­ ception of politics, as were Hume’s teachings that authority and liberty, selfishness and altruism, passion and reason, existed in comparable rela­ tions of tension and symbiosis. English and Scottish theorists could not free themselves from the vision of some ultimate corruption, but had for the most part freed themselves from riding upon a wheel where the catastrophe might come at any moment. If the perception of reality obtaining in the colonies was so much more fragile, part of the explanation may lie in the fact that they con­ stituted a Country without a Court; they were not face to face with modern government as a force they must and could find means of liv­ ing with, but, while created b y it at a distance, were not in a relation of immediate symbiosis. T he greater their apparent independence, the greater their sense that their virtue was their own; but the more active a government in which they did not directly participate, the greater their sense that their independence and virtue were threatened b y a force they could only call corruption; and, as Machiavelli and Cato had taught them, once they mistrusted government there was nothing they should not fear. T yran n y was indeed to be dreaded “ in every tainted breeze.” T h e interpretation put forw ard b y Bailyn and W ood altogether replaces that of Boorstin and Hartz, who seem to have held that there was no ideology in America, because ideology could be produced only b y Old W orld social tensions which had not been transplanted.4 A s w e now see it, modern and effective government had transplanted to Am erica the dread of modernity itself, of which the threat to virtue b y corruption was the contemporary ideological expression. Am erica had been established b y plantation, but secured b y con­ quest. The steps b y British governments which initiated the process of classical revolution were taken in the course of the reorganization which followed the Seven Years W ar. From this Britain had emerged triumphant in N orth America and India; there had occurred a huge expansion of her commercial, naval and colonial power, and she was 4 Daniel Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1953) and The Americans: the Colonial Experience (New York: Random House, 1958); Louis B. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: A n Interpreta­ tion of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955). 509

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recognized as possessing empire on a giant scale. This was the appro­ priate moment, according to all the conventions of the classical vocabu­ lary, at which to utter warnings against the fate of Rome, transformed from a republic to a despotism by the conquest of an empire whose wealth corrupted the citizenry and could only be distributed by a Caesar; but though such warnings were heard in Britain, they were directed mainly against the supposed activities of Indian and W est Indian nabobs, whose movable wealth might cause them to swell a new “ monied interest” and buy up parliament through the purchase of boroughs.5 The conquest of the internal river system of N orth America aroused few er such fears, and seems to have been assimilated to that profitable yet not corrupting maritime war which Country politicians had long compared favorably with war by land in Europe; it was involvement on the side of Hanover and Prussia which Chatham had found needed most defending in parliament. For Americans, however, there was an evident paradox in the discovery that imperial conquests, w hich had rendered them secure against foreign and aboriginal enemies, now faced them with the threat of corruption by their own govern­ ment. In such circumstances the rhetoric o f republic and Caesar was appropriate and was used;6 yet were not Americans, even in their own eyes, a system of colonies extending an empire, and not a republic at all? But the term “ empire,” it is important to note, was capable in the Machiavellian tradition of being used in more than one w ay. On the one hand, Rome had been corrupted b y conquest, and in that sense by empire; and it was and has remained normal usage to distinguish between the republic and “ the empire,” meaning the rule b y principes who were also imperatores which succeeded it. On the other hand, the Roman people had exercised imperium in the . ense of power over other peoples, which they had built up as Machiavelli’s “ commonwealth for expansion” and b y the exercise of Machiavellian virtii. A4ust the success­ ful exercise of virtu be in the end the cause of its corruption? Machia­ velli had on the whole thought that it must, and the neo-Harringtonians had equated the decay of the republic with commercial empire, which had as in their own day led to the grow th of monied interests and professional armies. But it was part of the Augustan paradox that this kind of military and financial corruption was thought of as growing through the pursuit of land war in Europe, while war at sea and in the colonies was part of the non-corrupting virtus of the Country. H ar­ rington’s Oceana had “ given laws to the sea,” pursuing foreign planta­ tions which made her a “ commonwealth for expansion” unthreatened 5 The climax of such rhetoric is to be found in the debates over Fox’s India Bill of 1783, and in the impeachment of Warren Hastings. 6 W ood, pp. 34-36. 5

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by corruption; and Americans gazing beyond the Appalachians could— with the aid of a little contemplated genocide— share the same vision. Even if empire must ultimately corrupt, there was a historical anakukldsis w hereby liberty-loving warriors— Greeks, Romans, and Goths— won empires by their virtue and held them so long as it lasted. This, hinted at in Machiavelli’s theory of the exhaustion and revival of virtu, had become assimilated to the medieval doctrine of translatio imperii and helps explain the freedom with which Americans of the early national period spoke of the “ empire” which was to be theirs in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. An empire compatible with virtue was a concept very necessary to them if they were to accept themselves as what they were b y the circumstances of their foundation and prehistory. Th e Am erican version o f translatio im perii was expressed as early as 1725 in the famous last stanza of Berkeley’s Verses on the Prospect o f the Arts and Learning in A m erica: W estward the course of empire takes its w ay; T h e four first acts already past A fifth shall close the drama with the day; T im e’s noblest offspring is the last. Ernest Tuveson, the author of an illuminating study of the millennial vision of America, denies that these lines are properly millennial, on the grounds that there is insufficient evidence that the fifth act of the drama will partake of the characteristics of a true millennium; he sees in them only a late-Renaissance vision of the decline and revival of the arts, married to the language of the Book of Daniel.7 But the translatio studii, like the translatio im perii, is dependent on the transition of virtus (as Berkeley himself makes manifest) and we are accustomed to see virtue demand, if it does not substitute itself for, an apocalyptic context of grace acting in history; and Tuveson himself has shown how far the true millennium, of Christ’s reign over the saints, had become iden­ tified with a future utopia,8 in which human capacities would have providentially and progressively arrived at their perfection. It is hard to doubt that Berkeley’s “ fifth act” was sometimes taken to mean a Fifth M onarchy, the more so as Tuveson has extensively demonstrated the existence of an American apocalyptic, in which the translatio im perii, ensuring that the westward cycle of world history culminates in America, became one mode of assigning to that imperial republic precisely the millennial-utopian role he has described. 7 Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago University Press, 1968), pp. 92-94. 8 Millennium a?id Utopia; see above, ch. 11, n. 21. 5*1

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Th e national apocalyptic pioneered b y Elizabethan Protestants pos­ sessed an American variant which survived there without undergoing the extensive recession suffered b y this mode of thought in England after the Restoration. N e w England’s initial covenant with the Lord could very easily be given a role in the struggle against Antichrist, and this was in no sense minimized b y the persistent jeremiad preachings in which the heirs of the covenant were denounced for falling aw ay from it. A covenanted or chosen people m ay apostasize many times, and the record of the struggle against the Adversary may be the rec­ ord of its apostasies and regenerations. But we have seen how readily, in late Puritan and even deist thought, the commonwealth in which there is no clergy, and religion is a civic function conducted b y an assembly of citizens, can become equated with the priesthood of all believers and the rule of the saints foretold for the millennium; and the more millennium became utopia, and the rule of the saints the per­ fection of human capacities, the easier it was to equate the common­ wealth with the Fifth M onarchy to which it had always tended to become assimilated. And the perfection of human capacities, seen as providentially directed progress rather than a sudden and apocalyptic infusion of grace, was a secular and historical phenomenon which might well take place within the closed circle of the “ westward course.” Am erica’s apocalyptic-utopian role, therefore, was regularly seen as the maintenance of religious liberty— W higgish tolerance m erg­ ing into the holy commonwealth— and part of a structure of Gothic freedom and virtue, which survived in the “ westward course” to the “ close” of the “ drama” after corruption had destroyed it in the Old W orld. But this was to identify corruption with the w ork of Antichrist in both hemispheres, and in particular with the ever-present threat of apostasy in the covenanted lands of the Newr W orld. It is therefore logical that Tuveson should have traced the existence of what he calls “ apocalyptic W higgism ” and found its echoes even in the language of so un-chiliastic a w ork as John Adam s’s Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law s .9 T h e city upon a hill became identified with the balanced government, in which neither an established clergy nor any other agency of corruption disturbed the virtue and freedom of the people, and the corruption which threatened the latter was as much the w ork of Antichrist as the apostasy which threatened the former. As the operations of grace in sacred history became conflated with the provi­ dential progress of secular enlightenment, Antichrist in his turn became identified with the historical forces— Roman clericalism, feudal sur­ 9 Redeem er Nation, pp. 20-25; W ood, pp. 116-18.

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vivals, modern corruptions— operating to delay progress or pervert it. A rbitrary taxation, standing armies, established churches, could still appear the works of the malign agency which had pursued and under­ mined Roman, Gothic, and now British virtue through the translatio and anakukldsis of the w orld’s history. It was of eschatological as well as global importance to determine whether empire would corrupt Am erican virtue or sustain it, and the latter outcome might be hard to distinguish from the millennium or Fifth M onarchy. The jeremiad— that most Am erican of all rhetorical modes— was merged with the lan­ guage of classical republican theory to the point where one can almost speak of an apocalyptic Machiavellism; and this too heightened the tendency to see that moment at which corruption threatened America as one of unique and universal crisis.

[ii] T he apocalyptic dimension, however, while apparent in the rhetoric of the Revolution, is hardly dominant there. Americans of that genera­ tion saw themselves as freemen in arms, manifesting a patriot virtue, rather than as covenanted saints. T he reasons for emphasizing in these pages that apocalyptic was still an available recourse are analytical and diagnostic; its presence, and continued compatibility with Old W hig civic humanism, illustrates how far American thought and speech still belonged to the Renaissance tradition we have studied, in which the citizen often required for his self-dramatization the apocalyptic con­ text otherwise properly the saint’s. But all those who have recently studied the Revolution in terms of the continuity of this tradition— Bailyn, Pole, and W ood— insist that, in the period of the making of the Constitution and the Federalist-Republican debate, the civic tradi­ tion underwent a transforming crisis and was never the same again; W ood in particular speaks of an “ end of classical politics.” 10 T o arrive at so massively dialectical a culmination would indeed be satisfying to the hard-pressed architect of a book such as this, and W ood’s thesis requires careful investigation; certain reservations will, however, be expressed. Perceptive students of the American scene, writing earlier than the crisis which led to independence, had observed that the volatility of colonial politics could be explained b y reference to the lack of any 10 Bailyn, Ideological Origins, ch. v, “Transformation” ; Political Pamphlets of the American Revolution, i (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 1965), pp. 3202 (“The Transforming Radicalism of the American Revolution” ); Pole, Political Representation, pp. 531-32 (“the decline of virtue” ); W ood, ch. xv, #5, pp. 60618 (“The End of Classical Politics” ).

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equivalent to the House of Lords.11 B y this they meant two not very compatible things. In the first place they were alluding to the doctrine that the Lords in the British constitution played the role of a classical Few , exhibiting greater leisure and experience— it was possible to defend their hereditary character on the ground that it guaranteed these qualities— and discharging a conservative and moderating function which could be depicted as that of a pouvoir intermediaire, a “ screen and bank” in the language of 1642, between king and commons, one and many, executive and legislative. W ithout an aristocracy, it had been argued since at latest 1675, the commons would be restive and turbulent and could be managed only by force or b y corruption. The Country tradition of Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke was in no sense hos­ tile to the peerage; it saw hereditary status as a reinforcement of prop­ ertied independence and a guard against the machinations of the Court, and the Peerage Bill of 171 9 had failed because it was felt that any at­ tempt to legislate further independence for the Upper House must be self-defeating. In the second place, however, analysts o f colonial politics knew that an ancient aristocracy was hard to establish in a new society and a manorial nobility did not seem to thrive under settler conditions (though the Hudson V alley might offer grounds for disputing this). The Harringtonian constitutions devised b y Locke, Penn, and others for the Carolinas, N e w Jersey, and Pennsylvania had all proved abortive,12 and if an independent aristocracy could not be created under colonial conditions, to propose a reinforced second chamber was to propose a dependent oligarchy, nominated b y the governor and pre­ cariously holding office at his will, like the Cromwellian Other House of 1657-1659. The republican tradition, as voiced by Machiavelli and Harrington, indeed declared that colonies and provinces should be ruled through insecure oligarchies dependent on the controlling pow er;13 like an Italian dominio, they were not fully incorporated in the city or realm of justice; but once a colony began thinking of itself as a commonwealth or autonomously just society— a vital change of perspective to which the adoption of classical language pow erfully contributed— such an oligarchy appeared inherently corrupt and, since it could not in practice be distinguished from the governor’s council, a breach of the separation of powers as well. 11 Wood, pp. 210-12. 12 Francis Newton Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States and Territories N o w or Hereto­ fore Forming the United States of A?nerica (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909), vol. v, has texts of all these. 13 For Harrington see Toland, Works, pp. 40-41.

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The conditions of colonial politics therefore pointed pow erfully if illogically toward that repudiation of hereditary aristocracy as making for corruption rather than for virtue, which had been unheard of in England since the radical movements of the Commonwealth; and in the era— supposedly begun b y Thomas Paine’s Common Sense— when Americans set about repudiating the British constitutional structure, the existence of a hereditary peerage in the latter helped them to take up the option— which they may have learned from Cato's Letters— of dismissing parliamentary mixed monarchy as founded upon corruption. T o reject parliamentary monarchy was, for minds still as English as theirs, to revert to the Harringtonian tradition in which English politi­ cal history was restated as leading to a republican culmination; but in Harrington as in every other republican classic, it was unequivocally stated that the alternative to a hereditary, entrenched, or artificial aris­ tocracy was a natural aristocracy— an elite of persons distinguished by natural superiority of talent, but also b y contingent material advantages such as property, leisure, and learning, as possessing the qualities of mind required b y the classical Few . It was assumed that a supply of such persons was guaranteed by nature, and part of the case against artificially established aristocracies was that the true elite were naturally recognizable by the Many. T h e dem ocracy could discover the aristo­ cracy by using its own modes of discernment, and there was no need to legislate its choice in advance; a theory of deference was usually invoked in order to democratize the polity. In most American colonies a patrician elite— distinguished indeed by its visible property and culture— stood ready to play the role of natural aristocracy. T he literature of colonial Virginia in particular contains some interesting idealizations of the relationship supposed to exist between the self-evident leaders of society and the respectful but by no means uncritical yeom anry.14 These illustrate once again that defer­ ence was not a hierarchical but a republican characteristic. The M any of ideal Virginia— small white proprietors— are not politically dynamic, but they are not inactive; they exercise their own kind of judgment and exert their own kind of power. All that could be called hierarchical is that they do not expect to discharge the same role as the Few ; but they have their virtue as the Few have theirs, and there is a higher virtue w hereby the F ew and M any respect the virtues exercised by one another. The F ew are not above a kind of deference to the judg­ ment of the M any, even when they deem its expression naive; so that 14 Charles S. Sydnor, Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practice in Washington's Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952), republished as American Revolutionaries in the Making (New York: Free Press, 1965); Pole, Political Representation, pp. 148-65.

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there is a point at which deference and virtue become very nearly identical. In defense of their virtue against a corrupt parliamentary monarchy, then, the Americans set about reconstituting themselves as a confedera­ tion of republics; down to this point, their revolution was a rinnovazione in exactly the sense intelligible to Savonarola or Machiavelli.15 But it is W ood’s thesis, documented in great detail from the language and experience of the Revolutionaries themselves, that this consciously undertaken classical enterprise failed at precisely the point we have been examining. W hen there occurred a Lockean “ dissolution of gov­ ernment” — in some areas it was so described, with invocations of Locke’s name— the people were found not to differentiate themselves into a naturally distinguishable few and many, perform ing comple­ mentary roles and practicing complementary virtues. In Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, there were deliberately engineered con­ stitutional experiments aimed at identifying the natural aristocracy by applying the Aristotelian criteria of property, as in Massachusetts, or self-selection, as in the unicameral legislature which was tried in Penn­ sylvania. None o f these experiments succeeded, and soon after the end of the W ar of Independence, the Revolution faced a crisis of confi­ dence born of the realization that the naturally differentiated people, presupposed b y every republican theorist from Aristotle to Montes­ quieu, had simply failed to appear.16 And this meant far more than that the patrician elites, having led or survived the struggle for independ­ ence, now felt threatened in their ideologically justifying role as natu­ ral aristocracies; it meant that there was a threat to the concept of vir­ tue itself. Unless the people were qualitatively dissimilar, each qualitatively defined category having a function and a virtue appropriate to it, they could not join in a polity where the practice of politics obliged each citizen to practice the virtue of respecting his neighbor’s virtue; and any political structure in which they might be united would bear no direct relationship to the unique moral personality of the individual, and would consequently corrupt it b y subjecting it to power. W hen Machiavelli and Montesquieu had laid it down that only equality— in the sense of isonomia— made possible the practice of virtue, they had also implied that men who were equal must practice virtue or become corrupt. W hen the neo-Harringtonians had associated the decline of the baron-vassal relationship with the rise of corruption, they had 15 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), should be read on this point. 16 W ood, passim, but particularly pp. 391-425. 516

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added to H arrington’s doctrine that equals must be governed freely or b y force the perception that they might also be governed b y manipu­ lation and false consciousness. If corruption was to be avoided, there must be virtue within equality; and the still largely Christian minds of eighteenth-century civic humanists had sought to ensure this by employing the classical differentiation into one, few, and many to make the people a trinity-in-unity, within which there could be rela­ tionship and hence virtue. But this orthodoxy now seemed to be fail­ ing. The materia was beginning to seem too monophysite and one­ dimensional to be given form, and the paradigm of the zdon politikofi was in danger. There is an audible note of dismay in the American writings of the early 1780s. W ood traces, through the rich complexity of the utterances of this period— all articulate Americans seem to have been versed in the vocab­ ulary of the sociology of liberty— the emergence of a new paradigm of democratic politics, designed by the masters of Federalist theory to overcome the crisis caused b v the failure of natural aristocracy— though whether they intended to replace the last-named, or to restore it, is not always clear. The crucial revision was that of the concept of the people. Instead of being differentiated into diversely qualified and functioning groups, the people was left in so monistic a condition that it mattered little what characteristics it was thought of as possessing; and the various agencies of government— still essentially the legislature, judiciary, and executive of separation theory— were thought of as exercised not immediately, b y social groups possessing the relevant capacities, but mediately, b y individuals whose title to authority was that they acted as representing the people. All power was entrusted to representatives, and every mode of exercising power was a mode of rep­ resenting the people. If the people were an undifferentiated mass, pos­ sessed of infinitely diverse qualities, they possessed also an infinite capacity for differentiating between diverse modes of power and embodying themselves in correspondingly diverse means of representa­ tion. T h e y had come a long w ay from the Florentine materia. There was a distinction between the exercise of power in govern­ ment, and the power of designating representatives to exercise it; and it could be argued both that all government was the people’s and that the people had withdrawn from government altogether, leaving its exercise to a diversity of representatives who, situated as they were where the art of ruling might be learned from experience, took on the characteristics of the old natural aristocracy or specialized Few . Rous­ seau, with his insistence that the volonte generate should never engage in the taking of particular decisions, might have approved of this dis­ 517

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tinction between a constituent and a governing people; and he might have joined the Federalists in seeing Machiavelli’s ridurre ensured in the provision that the power of constitutional revision was always in the people and its exercise always potentially imminent.17 Here, at least, the people as such were active in a fairly immediate sense. W hat Rousseau would not have approved— and what is no part of the repub­ lican tradition as we have studied it— is the universal intervention in government of the relation between represented and representative; and here certainly the character of Federalist thought is medieval rather than classical and sovereign rather than republican— Hobbesian, it might even be added, rather than Lockean. English parliamentary monarchy had been built up b y the king’s commanding the shires and boroughs to elect representatives, w ith full power to share in the government of the realm b y himself and his council, and the power of these representatives had greatly increased over time. H owever, as the king’s command that they be given full power to act in matters to be proposed b y him clearly showed, there was a sense in which they were m erely admitted to a share in the func­ tion of the true representative of the realm— the king himself, who, as all theory of incorporation insisted, represented the realm as the head did the body. Once representation became a means to the creation and establishment of a sovereign, the act of choosing— or acknowledging— a representative became logically almost the reverse of participation; it was rather the act of saying that there existed a person whose acts were so far authoritative that they were to be taken as equivalent to one’s own; and Hobbes, spelling out this interpretation with admirable clarity, had pointed out that a sovereign assembly of representatives was no different in this respect from a sovereign and representative individual. T he choice of a representative was a surrender, a transfer to another of one’s plenitude of power and one’s persona if not one’s individuality; and republican humanism, which was fundamentally con­ cerned with the affirmation of moral personality in civic action, had cause to ask whether the concept of representation did not exclude that of virtue. H o w could I designate another to be virtuous for me, in m y place and wearing m y mask? A t the core of Hobbes’s moral theory is indeed the statement that it is only when I become capable of owning another’s actions as m y own that I become a being capable of civic m orality;18 but the zdon politikon, the being naturally civic, must act immediately and in his own person. Rousseau, an ambiguous master within the classical tradition, had insisted that there was no virtue in 17 W ood, pp. 613-14. 18 For Hobbes on personation, see Leviathan, chs. 16 and 17.

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the mere choice of a representative and that consequently people gov­ erned b y plenipotentiary representatives of their own choosing were not free.19 The Country tradition in English politics— partially descended from Harrington’s republicanism, in which rotation ensures that the people take part in government as individuals and b y turns, rather than through representatives— had made an important contribution toward redefining England as a commonwealth when it stressed the importance of short parliaments. T he implication was that the people, being prop­ ertied and independent, were by definition virtuous, but that their rep­ resentatives were constantly exposed to the temptations of power and corruption; it was therefore necessary that the representation should return regularly to the represented, to have virtue renewed (ridurre ai principii) by the choice of new representatives if necessary. Virtue was an active principle, and in the election of a new parliament the people displayed virtue in action and performed more than a Hobbesian role. But it now became hard to decide whether the electors were one estate or order of the commonwealth (a classical M any) and the elected another (a classical F e w ), the relations between whom must be pre­ served from corruption; or whether the elected were at bottom mere servants, stewards, or ministers, who must be presumed corruptible vir­ tually by definition. If the latter, then they must be considered dele­ gates, subject to instruction and recall; but there would be the difficulty that the relation between them and their electors would no longer be a virtuous relation between civic equals. During the years of the Am er­ ican crisis, Burke was propounding to the electors of Bristol the view that their representative was chosen by them to act for the good of the whole realm, and thus to play a part which they could not play themselves. He therefore owed them the exercise o f his judgment con­ cerning the common good, even when it conflicted with theirs.20 T h ey would be exercising their judgment with equal propriety if they decided not to reelect him at the close of his term, but they should not seek to impede his judgment by instructing or recalling him. The relationship is classical, that of the Few to the M any, and virtuous in the sense derived from Aristotle. Each has his judgment, his mode of discernment, and respects that of the other. In Revolutionary America, the tide had been running strongly in favor of the view that elected representatives were highly corruptible delegates, who must be subject to instruction and recall; but Madison 19 Rousseau, The Social Contract, ch. 15; C. E. Vaughan, ed., The Political Writings of Jea?i-Jacques Rousseau (New York: John W iley and Sons, 1962), 11, 95-98. 20 Burke, W orks, 11, 95-97.

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seems to have leaned toward a Burkean position which presented their role as that of a Few , and their ranks as to be filled, if possible, b y members of the patrician elites.21 The crucial question remained, how ­ ever, that raised by Rousseau. Given that a natural aristocracy had not emerged, and was not expected to emerge, from the electoral process, was the mere act of choosing a representative, the mere relationship between representative and elector, sufficient to ensure virtue? For some Federalists the answer was predetermined. If there was no natural aristocracy, the people could not be virtuous; if none had emerged, the most probable explanation was that the people were already corrupt; government accordingly became a Guicciardinian affair of guiding a people who were not virtuous, or helping them guide themselves, along paths as satisfactory as could be hoped for in these circumstances. This perspective, of course, did not prevent those who adopted it from regarding themselves as members of a virtuous natural aristocracy, Catos of the deserving side. Madison’s position, as we shall see, was more complex; but W ood shows that the Federalists talked both as if virtue was to be restored, and as if it had vanished and must be replaced b y new paradigms.22 And it was, as always, difficult to hit upon surro­ gates for virtue in its classical sense. There was this to be said for Rousseau’s critique of representation. Virtue consisted in a particular being’s regard for the common good, and was contingent upon his association with other particular beings who regarded the same good through different eyes. The differentiation of Few from M any, of natu­ ral aristocracy from natural democracy, was the paradigm case of this association between men of different qualities; and without some theory of qualitative and moral differentiation between individuals, it was hard to see how the relations between citizens that constituted virtue could be established. The act of choosing a person to act for me, one with whom I asserted an artificial identity, could never be the same as that of recognizing a person who acted with me, and with whom I formed a natural association. This was w h y it was hard to see the relation of representative to represented as one of classical virtue. Neither the Federalists nor their critics employed Rousseau as a tool of analysis,23 but there are perceptible tensions between their remodeling of the theory of representation and their unwillingness to abandon the para­ digm of the republic of virtue. T h ey sought— so successfully as to bring about something like a 21 W ood, p. 505. 22 W ood, pp. 474-75, 5°7-i8> 543-47. 5 6 l ~6 4 23 Paul M. Sperlin, Rousseau in America, 1760-1809 (University of Alabama Press, 1969), indicates that The Social Contract was not much read or quoted. Noah Webster—for whom see below, pp. 526, 533-35—is an interesting exception.

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paradigmatic revolution— to reconcile the two by developing a theory of multiple representation. Instead of a medieval or Hobbesian identity, natural or artificial, between the representative and the represented as simple entities, they asserted that there was a plurality of modes of exercising power and that every one of these— the quasi-classical exec­ utive, judiciary, and legislative were the obvious examples— constituted a separate mode in which the people chose to be represented. The peo­ ple’s representatives taken as individuals formed a plurality of func­ tionally differentiated groups, and to that extent might still be looked upon as a natural aristocracy; the plurality of functions which they exercised ensured the existence between and among them o f a system of checks and balances, so that it could be said they were prevented from becoming corrupt, or corrupting the people, by any one’s acquiring so much power as to bring the rest into dependence.24 The rhetoric of the classical tradition, from Aristotle to Montesquieu, thus remained appropriate over wide fields of the phenomena presented b y the new government; but beneath it— and accounting for the widespread belief that the concept of representation was the only great discovery in theo­ retical politics made since antiquity— lay that sharply new perspective which leads W ood to speak of an “ end of classical politics.” The peo­ ple were still thought of as uncorrupted, but there were important senses in which they need not and could not be said to affirm their virtue in action. T h e y were not differentiated into groups of diverse quality and function, each of which exercised citizenship in its own w ay and between which there existed the relationships of virtue; nor, since they were not politically active in a diversity of w ays functionally differentiated, could it strictly be said that they were directly or imme­ diately engaged in governing at all. T h ey were directly engaged in the choice of representatives, and the m ultiplicity of the federal structure ensured that this function could be seen as ongoing and perpetual; they were also constituent, directly engaged in the establishment and revi­ sion of constitutions, and there are passages of rhetoric which suggest that this too was seen as a continuous activity.25 Even Machiavelli, the most kinetic of republican theorists, had seen ridurre and ripigliare lo stato as no more than an affair of exemplary purges at intervals of a few years; even Rousseau had envisaged no more than occasional if frequent assemblies of the sovereign people, for the duration of which any constitution was necessarily suspended. If Federalist theory sur­ passed tradition at this point too, it is important to understand how. The decline of virtue had as its logical corollary ihe rise of interest.26 24 See, e.g., W ood, pp. 446-53. 25 W ood, pp. 532-36, 599-600, 613-14. 26 There is much semantic confusion on this point. Given that in classical theory each major institution “represented” a distinct “order” in society—e.g., the one, 5 21

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If men no longer enjoyed the conditions thought necessary to make them capable of perceiving the common good, all that each man was capable of perceiving was his own particular interest; and to the extent that there survived the very ancient presumption that only perception of the common good was truly rational, perception of one’s interest was primarily a matter of appetite and passion and only secondarily of profit-and-loss rational calculation which might extend so far as per­ ception of one’s interest as interdependent with that of another’s. Nonvirtuous man was a creature of his passions and fantasies, and when passion was contrasted with virtue its corruptive potential remained high; but we have already seen how in eighteenth-century theory fantasy and commerce could appear an explosive and transforming force, possessing the dynamism if also the limitations of Machiavellian virtu, and rather more than the latter’s capacity to transform the natures of men. Interest was both a limiting and an expanding force. As Federalist thought took shape, and the people were less and less seen as possessing virtue in the classical sense, it is not surprising to find, in Madison’s writings and those of others— the tenth issue of The Federalist is the locus classicus— an increasing recognition of the impor­ tance, and the legitimacy, in human affairs of the faction pursuing a collective but particular interest,27 which in older Country and repub­ lican theory had figured as one of the most deadly means to the cor­ ruption of virtue b y passion. Interest and faction are the modes in which the decreasingly virtuous people discern and pursue their activi­ ties in politics; but in Madison’s thought two consequences soon follow. In the first place, the checks, balances, and separations of powers, to be built into the federal structure, ensure as we have seen that interest does not corrupt, so that the full rhetoric of balance and stability can still be invoked in praise of an edifice no longer founded in virtue, and the very fact that it is no longer so founded can easily be masked and forgotten.28 In the second place, there are passages which strikingly indicate that the capacity of this structure for absorbing and reconcil­ ing conflicting interests is without known limits.29 There is no interest the few, and the many—it was by this time possible to speak of these “ orders” as “interests” ; and radical democrats, speaking still from within the classical tradi­ tion, could argue that in the popular assembly individuals, not relatively elitist interests, were what should be “represented.” But in true interest-group theory, which may be the child of radical individualism, the individual needs to perceive only his interests and the group with which they associate him, and need not practice the “virtue” of looking beyond them. 27 Pole, pp. 374-75; Wood, pp. 501-506, 576. 28 W ood, pp. 535-47, 559-60. 29 Wood, pp. 605-10, relying largely on The Federalist, no. 51. 5 22

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which cannot be represented and given its place in the distribution of power— only the most peculiar of institutions, it has seemed to his­ torians in the Federalist tradition, was to prove an exception to this rule— and should the growth and change of the people generate new interests, the federal republic can grow and change to accommodate them. In this uend of classical politics,” W ood detects primarily a partial shift from republicanism to liberalism30— from, that is to say, the classi­ cal theory of the individual as civic and active being, directly partici­ pant in the res publica according to his measure, toward (if not fully reaching) a theory in which he appears as conscious chiefly of his interest and takes part in government in order to press for its realiza­ tion, making only an indirect contribution to that mediating activity w hereby government achieves a reconciliation of conflicts which is all the common good there is. In this sense, representative democracy involves a recession, on the part of both individual and “ people,” from direct participation in government, of which the “ decline of virtue” is the measure; but it does not involve political quiescence or a low er­ ing of tensions. It also coincides with a vast expansion of party activity and appeal to a highly responsible electorate. W ood further detects in Madison a dimension of thought which is kinetic and romantic. Because “ the people” is now undifferentiated, it is not circumscribed by the definition and distribution of specific qualities. It is of unknown mass and force, and can develop new and unpredicted needs, capacities, and powers. All of these can be received and coordinated within the struc­ ture of federalism, so that the classical rhetoric of balance and stability is still appropriate, but this structure can be proclaimed capable of indefinite expansion, since there is no need to insist in advance that the new social elements which will seek representation be those previously conceived as part of the harmonics of virtue. T h e y are not perceived rationally as elements in the architecture of the common good, but as interests conceived and pursued in passion; the federal structure, how­ ever, is capable of absorbing new passions and grows b y absorbing them. If the people are perpetually constituent, therefore, this is because they and their republic are in perpetual and kinetic growth. The repub­ lic of represented interests is a commonwealth for expansion. Some­ thing has been lost to virtue, but more has been gained b y virtu. The liberal structure is not tame or sedate; like archetypal Rome before it, it is at once stable and expansive. W ood’s “ end of classical politics” is at bottom predicated upon an abandonment of the closely related paradigms of deference and virtue. Because natural aristocracy failed the Americans in the moment of 30 W ood, pp. 562, 606-15. 523

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classical rinnovazione, they had to abandon any theory o f the people as qualitatively differentiated, and therefore either virtuous in the classi­ cal sense or participant in government in ways directly related to per­ sonality; and at the heart of Federalist thought arose something akin to the paradoxes of Rousseau— all government was the people’s, and yet the people never directly governed. This price once paid, the advantages of the great restatement of paradigms which accompanied the conservative revolution of 1787-89 were enormous. It permitted the overcoming of the w idely accepted limitation which enjoined repub­ lics to be of finite size if they would escape corruption; the new federa­ tion could be both republic and empire, continental in its initial dimen­ sions and capable of further expansion by means of simple extensions of the federative principle, greatly surpassing the semimilitary complex of colonies and provinces which had extended the Roman hegemony. It permitted the growth of new modes of association in pursuit of par­ ticular ends— political parties which, it has been argued by Chambers,31 were modern in precisely the sense that they were not based on defer­ ence, and which mobilized participant energies on a scale undreamed o f in ancient republics. It is not surprising, then, that W ood and Cham­ bers tend to speak of deference as the principle of the classical repub­ lic, and that republic itself as a subspecies of the closed and stable social hierarchy;32 though less cautious proponents of this view are (and long have been) open to the criticism that they confound the natural with the hereditary aristocracy. But our pursuit of the Machiavellian consequences of the republican principle that virtue is active has led us through realms of consciousness in which deference was not passive and the republic was not a hier­ archy. W e have grow n used to thinking of virtue as active in a world of proportionately equal citizens, and the republic as expanding beyond the confines of that world through the exercise of virtii. In the Polybian and Machiavellian tradition, the republic was not simply and naturally finite, and the injunction to remain small must not be misread. It faced the dilemma, born of its finitude, that it could escape neither expansion nor the corruption that followed expansion. The American republic proposed from its inception to offer a fresh solution to this ancient problem; the terms of this solution were in some respects dramatically new, but in others a restatement of old. W e have further grow n used 31 William N . Chambers, Political Parties in a N ew Nation: the American Experience, 1776-180^ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963). 32 E.g., Wood, p. 606; Chambers, pp. 122-24; Pole, pp. 528-31. W ood in particu­ lar presents the republic as an ideal essentially hierarchical and at the same time essentially mobile; pp. 478-79. 524

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to the existence in British thought of an alternative or “ Court” ideol­ ogy, which emphasized that men were guided by interest and passion, that factions and parties were necessary rather than illegitimate, and that government must be carried on by a sovereign power, ultimately unchecked but capable of subdivision into self-balancing powers, which ruled men partly b y direct authority, partly b y appeal to those pas­ sions, and partly b y conversion of those passions into perception of a common interest. It should be clear b y now that important elements of this ideology reappear in Federalist theory at just the points where the latter moves aw ay from virtue and toward interest. There are, however, some major and obvious differences. W here the Court thesis locates sovereignty in a parliamentary monarchy, selfbalanced b y the distinction between executive and legislative but held together b y the influence which the former wields in the latter, the Federalist thesis locates it in the represented people and maintains the separation of powers with a rigor which is republican rather than m erely Country. Once again we are at the point where the full rhetoric of republicanism was entirely appropriate to Federalist purposes, and the extent to which virtue was being abandoned could be masked to speakers as well as audiences. W here the Court thesis appealed to a version of history in which there were pragmatic adjustments and no fundamental principles, the Federalists could and did claim to be found­ ing a republic in an extra-historical and legislative moment— one of occasione— in which the principles of nature, including balance and even virtue, were being reaffirmed. Their kinetic and expansive vision was of the future, and carried with it no Machiavellian sense o f being part of an already disorderly saeculum. Finally, the Court thesis, origi­ nating as we have seen in the collisions of war and credit finance with the presumed stability of landed property, entailed a high degree of recognition that credit and commerce formed the expansive principle, the blend of Machiavellian virtu and fortuna, which doomed men to follow their passions and government to acknowledge and utilize cor­ ruption. W hether or not the failure of natural aristocracy in revolu­ tionary America can be attributed to the competition of new merchant and artisan elements with the older patrician elites, there seems little evidence that the thought of the 1780s was responding to a traumatic intrusion of the “ monied interest” like that which so dramatically altered English thinking ninety years before. There was no American Court— as yet; the confrontation between virtue and commerce was not absolute, and once again this furnishes reason to believe that the founders of Federalism were not fully aware of the extent to which their thinking involved an abandonment of the paradigm of virtue. In 525

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what follows, it will be argued that W ood’s “ end of classical politics” was an end of one guiding thread in a complex tissue, but not a dis­ appearance of the whole web.

[m] W ood shows how it came about that John Adams’s D efence of the Constitutions o f the United States, a vindication of the federal republic as a strict classical blend of natural aristocracy and democracy, was rejected as already a historical freak: partly misunderstood as a defense of the aristocratic principle, partly diagnosed correctly, b y more acute minds such as John T aylo r of Caroline, as a defense of the republic upon principles which the republic itself had abandoned.33 Such was the ironic— but, given its author’s personality, appropriate— fate of per­ haps the last major w ork of political theory written within the unmodi­ fied tradition of classical republicanism. W ood also brings to light two Federalists at least, of the middle to late eighties— Noah W ebster in 1785, W illiam Vans M urray in 1787— who declared specifically (as did Hamilton and T a ylo r) that the virtue of the individual was no longer a necessary foundation of free government; and M urray at least declared, follow ing a line laid down by Montesquieu but going beyond him, that the imperative of subjecting private to public good had been invented in a rude and precommercial society and need not be upheld now that the true secret of republican liberty was known.34 Liberty, then, could dispense with virtue and would not be corrupted b y afflu­ ence; but whether M urray was pronouncing a conservative or a revo­ lutionary creed, it would be impossible to say without some modifica­ tion of language. But even after the wealth of detail with which W ood’s, Pole’s, and other analyses have explored the thesis of an implicit abandonment of virtue in Federalist theory, we are not faced with a generation who unanimously made this abandonment explicit. In the last few paragraphs reason has been found for suggesting that the rhetoric of balance and separation of powers operated to keep the language of republican tradi­ tion alive; and it can now be further argued that the vocabulary of virtue and corruption persisted in American thought, not m erely as a survival slow ly dying after its tap-root was cut, but with a reality and 33 W ood, ch. xiv, “The Relevance and Irrelevance of John Adams,” pp. 567-92. For other studies of Adams as among the last great classical theorists, see Zoltan Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1 9 5 2 ); John R. Howe, Jr., The Changing Political Thought of John Adams (Princeton University Press, 1966). 34 W ood, pp. 6 1 0 - 1 1 ; for Taylor, pp. 591-92. 526

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relevance to elements in American experience that kept it alive and in tension with the consequences that followed its partial abandonment in so crucial a field as constitutional theory and rhetoric. If Americans had been compelled to abandon a theory of constitutional humanism which related the personality to government directly and according to its diversities, they had not thereby given up the pursuit of a form of political society in which the individual might be free and know him­ self in his relation to society. The insistent claim that the American is a natural man and America founded on the principles of nature is enough to demonstrate that, and the pursuit of nature and its dis­ appointments can readily be expressed in the rhetoric of virtue and corruption; for this is the rhetoric of citizenship, and a cardinal asser­ tion of W estern thought has been that man is naturally a citizen— kata phusin zdon politikon. H owever, American social thought has long employed a paradigm, supposedly Locke’s, of government emerging from and highly continuous with a state of natural sociability; and it has been seriously contended that no other paradigm than Locke’s has thriven or could have thriven in the unique conditions of American society.35 In this book we have been concerned with another tradition, reducible to the sequence of Aristotle’s thesis that human nature is civic and Machiavelli’s thesis that, in the world of secular time where alone the polis can exist, this nature of man may never be more than partially and contradictorily realized. Virtue can develop only in time, but is always threatened with corruption b y time. In the special form taken when time and change were identified with commerce, this tradition has been found to have been operative over wide areas of thought in the eighteenth century, and to have provided a pow erful impulse to the American Revolution. But so great is the strength o f the “ Lockean” paradigm among modern scholars that there is a real likelihood that W ood’s demonstration of a shift aw ay from classical humanist premises in the making of the Federal Constitution will be interpreted as an “ end of classical politics” and a wholesale adoption of the “ Lockean” style. It is therefore of some importance, as we conclude this study of the Machiavellian tradition, to review the evidence which suggests that the theses and antitheses of virtue and corruption continued to be of great importance in shaping American thought. The episode of the Order of the Cincinnati is relevant here. W hen we read that officers of the former revolutionary arm y formed them­ selves into a society, which took its name from that Roman hero who was called from the plough to take the consulship and thankfully returned to it afterwards, but that this society was suspected o f a design 35 Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America; n. 4, above.

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to constitute itself as a hereditary aristocracy, there is not much ques­ tion about the conceptual universe in which the incident occurred. In a similar w ay, the Second Amendment to the Constitution, apparently drafted to reassure men’s minds against the fact that the federal gov­ ernment would maintain something in the nature of a professional army, affirms the relation between a popular militia and popular free­ dom in language directly descended from that of Machiavelli, which remains a potent ritual utterance in the United States to this day. The new republic feared corruption by a professional army, even while— like England a century before— it saw no alternative to establishing one; and the implications of the rhetoric employed in this context were to be fully worked out in the debates and journalism of the first great conflict between American parties. T w o recent studies36 have underlined the extent to which Alexander Hamilton appeared to his Republican and Jeffersonian adversaries a figure defined in ominous outline by every tradition in which corrup­ tion threatened the republic. He desired to establish a Bank of the United States, and a class of fundholding public creditors who would be directly interested in upholding the government of the republic and the influence of its executive in Congress; and every reader of Cato's Letters, Bolingbroke or James Burgh’s Political Disquisitions— all w idely distributed in America— must recognize him as pursuing the tradition of the Junto W higs, W alpole and George III, which had contributed so pow erfully to the belief that Britain was irredeemably corrupt. T o the extent— not inconsiderable— to which Hamilton saw government as conducted by a strong executive which could get its w ay in the legislature, the means he was seen as promoting seemed to make for a reversion to the style of parliamentary monarchy, which all agreed could not get its w ay without influence, but which Madi­ sonian Federalism— to say nothing of more radically republican schools of thought— had insisted on abandoning as corrupt and unnatural. This was what was meant b y the repeated charge that the Federalist party of the nineties desired to restore the English constitution, and the cry that Hamilton’s fundholders would in due time become a hereditary aristocracy is simply an index to the Am erican reversion to the style of the Good Old Cause. Lastly, Hamilton’s known desire to build up the republic’s permanent m ilitary strength, and the widespread suspicion that he hoped to head that strength himself, were all that was needed to confirm his critics in their inherited belief that rule b y a strong 36 Gerald Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican G overn­ ment (Stanford University Press, 1970); Lance G . Banning, Ph.D. dissertation, “The Quarrel with Federalism; a study in the origins and character of Republican thought,” Washington University, 1972.

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executive, wielding influence and supported by a monied interest, led logically to rule, at once corruptive and dictatorial, b y a standing army. This aspect of the Federalist-Republican controversy is therefore to a quite startling extent a replay of the debates of Court and Country as much as a hundred years before. The Jeffersonians spoke the lan­ guage of the Country and knew that they spoke it; it is less clear that Hamilton consciously repeated the arguments of Defoe or the W alpoleans, a rhetoric never so highly developed in Britain and ill adapted to an American context. But Gerald Stourzh’s exploration of Hamil­ ton’s thought against the background of republican humanism has left no doubt that he considered himself a “ modern W h ig” in the context of the neo-Machiavellian contrast between virtuous antiquity and com­ mercial modernity. W e have quoted his remark that “ Cato was the T o ry , Caesar the W hig of his day . . . the form er perished with the republic, the latter destroyed it.” 37 The tone is clearly one of prefer­ ence for success over deservingness, virtu over virtue; and it was lan­ guage of this kind which persuaded Jefferson that Hamilton admired Caesar and wished to emulate him. But when Hamilton became con­ vinced of a threat to his own role from Aaron Burr, he denounced Burr as an “ embryo Caesar” 38 and a Catiline— a figure one shade darker than Caesar’s in the spectrum of republican demonology. Burr was to Ham­ ilton what Hamilton was to Jefferson, and even the sentence about Cato and Caesar was written in the course of a warning against Bu rr’s ambitions; what makes Burr a Catiline rather than a Caesar, it is interest­ ing to note, is that his ambition is devoid of “ the love of glory” 39— virtus in a very classical sense indeed. Hamilton’s feelings about Caesar, then, are rich in Machiavellian moral ambiguity; but to Machiavelli himself, Caesar had been a thoroughly execrable figure and no hero at all. It is the use o f the words “ T o r y ” and “ W h ig” which gives us the clue to Hamilton’s meaning. The connotations are not contemporary, but Augustan; the imperator Caesar can be a “ W h ig” only in the con­ text of Queen Anne’s reign, when the W higs had been the party of war, of M arlborough, and the monied interest. T he triumph of Caesar over Cato is the triumph of commerce over virtue, and of empire over republic. It is this historical role which transforms Caesar into an arche­ type of ambiguous virtu. Stourzh proceeds40 to show that Hamilton saw America as pre­ destined to become a commercial and m ilitary empire, of a sort to which the figure of Caesar was indeed appropriate, but in which his role must be played b y “ modern W h ig” structures of government if it was not to be played b y demagogues like Burr. The whole argument 37 Stourzh, p. 99 and n. 85; p. 239. 39 Stourzh, pp. 98-102.

38 Stourzh, p. 98. 40 Chs. iv and v, passim.

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is based on the ascendancy of commerce over frugality, empire over virtue; Hamilton can be said to have added a fourth term to the triads of Montesquieu, showing that if virtue is the principle of republics, interest is that of empires, so that a nonclassical federalism is necessary if the republic is to be also an empire. A W est Indian turned N ew Yorker, he saw America as a manufacturing and mercantile economy, trading into the Atlantic in competition with other trading societies, and he placed himself in the company of the great theorists of speciali­ zation b y affirming— in the tradition of Fletcher of Saltoun— that as societies had become increasingly commercial, they had become increasingly capable of paying soldiers and sailors to defend and extend their trade. It was this process of specialization— rather than any Hobson-Lenin theory of investment— which ensured that competition for trade became a competition for power, empire, and survival; for once military power was committed to the expansion of trade, military power itself must be fought for. Commerce and specialization were the causes of dynamic virtii. Government must now become an engine for the protection and expansion of external power; and in the internal relations between citizens, where liberty and justice were its rightful and necessary ends, it could not any longer base itself on the assump­ tion of virtue in the individual citizen, for as riches increase and accumulate in few hands; as luxury prevails in society; virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a grace­ ful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard. This is the real disposition of human nature. . . . It is a common misfortune, that awaits our state consti­ tution as well as all others.41 Parliamentary m onarchy in Britain, representative democracy in the United States, had alike presented themselves as modes of government appropriate to societies at the commercial stage of development, which was post-virtuous if it was not actually corrupt. Madison, when a col­ league of Hamilton’s, had helped build up an image of the federal rep­ resentative structure as one which might go on expanding, with interest being added to interest, and yet never become corrupt. If Madison separated himself passionately from Hamilton within a very few years of constitutional ratification, one reason for his doing so may have been that Hamilton’s argument clearly presupposes a higher degree of cor­ ruption, and a more brutally open recognition of its existence b y gov­ ernment, than Madison thought could possibly be accepted. The central issue came to be Hamilton’s banking proposals, which looked unpalata41 Stourzh, p. 71; and generally, pp. 70-75. 53°

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bly like a return to parliamentary m onarchy in the form denounced b y adversaries of W alpole and George III; but Hamilton’s stress on empire and m ilitary power may well have been an additional cause of Madison’s opposition.42 The passage from virtue to commerce was not, in Hamilton’s mind, a serene withdrawal into liberal complacency, into a world where separate interests balanced one another. He was opting for dominion and expansion, not for free trade, and emphatically rejected any argument that the interests of trading nations were peace­ fully complementary. There would be war, and there must be strong government; and on the other side of the ledger, he suspected that Madison’s theory of balancing interests made too little of the dangers of sectional conflict within a union of states.43 Hamilton’s empire was thus a challenge to Madison’s federalism, the more so because it was based on the same premise— the movement from virtue to interest— and drew more drastically Machiavellian conclusions. Could the repub­ lic shift its base from virtue without becoming in the full sense an empire? Could Am erica be republic and empire at the same time? Ham­ ilton did not answer these questions in the negative; but the terms in which he proposed to construct affirmative answers were unacceptably strong. T h ey were accordingly denounced as corruption.44 T he Federalist party of the 1790s is not, of course, to be thought of as made up of Hamiltons suspect of Caesarism; far more of its leading members probably saw themselves as Catos rather than Caesars, uphold­ ers of the stern unbending virtue of the natural aristocracy. John Adams, whose republicanism has seemed classical to the point of archa­ ism, was of course a Federalist; and John T a ylo r of Caroline, who had harshly criticized Adams’s D efence as obsolescent, was a Republican and wrote anti-Hamiltonian polemic in which the ghosts of Sw ift and Bolingbroke stalk on every page.45 N or should the Republicans be thought of as committed to the postclassical liberalism of the Madi­ sonian synthesis. Some of them walked in the footsteps of old-guard Antifederalists like Patrick H enry, whose austere sense of virtue had led them to criticize the Constitution itself as making too many con­ cessions to self-interest and empire;46 but once again, there were Anti­ federalists whose concern for virtue carried them into theposture of Catonian Federalism. The ideological spectrum which ran from repub­ lic to federal union to empire was like that of debate in Augustan E ng­ land, which ran from land to trade to credit; there were no fixed parti­ tions, and the same contradictions and perplexities were shared b y men at all points. The commitment to virtue, to the Machiavellian moment, 42 Banning, op.cit. 44 Banning, chs. iv - v i . 46 Stourzh, pp. 128-29; Wood, p. 526.

43 Stourzh, pp. 158-62. 45 Banning, pp. 299-311.

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had a w ay of producing this result; it made men aware that they were centaurs. For many— and the conditions of the early United States left this option open to many— the solution was to admit that they were cen­ taurs, and immerse themselves in the caucusing and brokerage o f pro­ fessional politics.47 But given the premise that American values were those of men engaged in the search for virtue under conditions admit­ ted to be partly unfavorable, it is interesting to have Tuveson’s opinion that Federalists were more likely than Republicans to adopt the per­ spective of millennialist apocalyptic as one in which the triumph of American virtue might be envisaged.48 W e have grown used to finding that virtue sometimes demands a millennium in which to behold itself as affirmed and justified b y grace; but on the face of it, the Republicans should be the party of virtue, the Federalists that of virtu. If we sup­ pose, however, that Federalists included men who believed that in them natural aristocracy was making its last stand, as well as men who believed that “ the real disposition of human nature” was toward luxury and empire, we shall have defined them as the party which saw virtue as exposed to the greatest threats and pressures, and it will be the less sur­ prising— since this was, after all, an American party— to find millennialists as well as Machiavellians in its ranks. The Jeffersonian persuasion, as we shall next see, had its own w ays of affirming the durability of virtue. T he passage just quoted, in which Hamilton affirms that “ the real disposition of human nature” is “ to depart from the republican stand­ ard,” must of course be set beside some even more striking and far more fully discussed writings of Thomas Jefferson. Students of American agrarianism have many times explored the meaning, and the ultimate ambiguities, of: Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an exam­ ple. It is the mark set on those who, not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their sub­ sistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ

47 Chambers, op.cit., studies this development. See also David Hackett Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the A ge of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). 48 Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, p. 120. 532

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of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. This, the natural progress and consequence of the arts, has sometimes per­ haps been retarded by accidental circumstance: but, generally speak­ ing, the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citi­ zens bears in any state to that of its husbandmen is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good-enough barometer w hereby to measure its degree of corruption. . . . T h e mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its constitution.49 “ The natural progress and consequence of the arts . . . sometimes . . . retarded b y accidental circumstance.” Jefferson is placing himself, and America, at a Rousseauan moment; man can avoid neither becoming civilized nor being corrupted b y the process; but the language further reveals that the process is political and the moment Machiavellian. There is even a glimpse of the continuity of commerce and fortuna; the words “ casualties and caprice” might without much distortion be replaced by “ fortune and fantasy” ; but it is typical of the eighteenthcentury debate that “ manners,” which had once, in the form of custom and tradition, served to retard the wheel of fortune, have now become progressive and corrupting. W e also know b y this time in what shapes corruption may be expected to occur. Dependent, subversive, and venal men in a commercial society are “ fit tools for the designs,” not only of classical demagogues like Burr, but also of architects of military-financial empire like Hamilton. Jefferson wrote this passage in 1785, but it prefigures the rhetoric of the next decade. He was, then, as committed as any classical republican to the ideal of virtue, but saw the preconditions of virtue as agrarian rather than natural; he was not a Cato, seeing the relation of natural aristocracy to natural democracy as the thing essential— unless this thought was in his mind as founder of the U niversity of Virginia— so much as a Tiberius Gracchus, seeing the preservation of a yeoman commonwealth as the secret of virtue’s maintenance. A t the same time, we see, he doubted whether agrarian virtue could be preserved forever; but neither his faith nor his doubts separate him from the tradition of classical politics, or from the new liberalism of Madisonian Federalism. A clue to this paradox is found when w e note that Noah Webster, 49 Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, “ Query xix” ; quoted and discussed at length in Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (N ew York: Oxford University Press, 1964, repr. 1970), pp. 12425 and 116-44. 533

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cited by W ood as affirming that the republic was no longer directly based on the virtue of the individual, wrote as follows: The system of the great Montesquieu will ever be erroneous, till the words property or lands in fee simple are substituted for virtue, throughout his Spirit o f Laws. Virtue, patriotism, or love of country, never was and never will be, till men’s natures are changed, a fixed, permanent principle and support of government. But in an agricultural country, a general possession of land in fee simple may be rendered perpetual, and the inequalities introduced by commerce are too fluctuating to endanger government. An equality of property, with a necessity of alienation, constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families, is the very soul o f a republic.50 W ebster was reverting to a directly Harringtonian position and argu­ ing that a material foundation was necessary to ensure virtue and equality, that freehold land was a more stable foundation than com­ merce, but that a predominantly agrarian society could absorb com­ merce without essential loss of virtue. If he indeed recognized that the Constitution rested upon a foundation other than virtue, that will have seemed to him a concession to the nonagrarian elements in the Am eri­ can system, a compromise in fact with commerce; but America could still remain a society rather agricultural than commercial. This, how ­ ever, would shift emphasis aw ay from the Constitution itself. T he insti­ tutions of virtue would now lie, not in the political ordini where classi­ cal theory would have seen the legislative intellect at w ork, but in the agrarian laws— or rather, as we shall see, in the unlegislated social forces and human energies— which secured the perpetuation of freehold equality. W e are on the verge of a theory in which frontier, not con­ stitution, is the “ soul of the republic,” unless the latter can be restored to centrality as the perfect resolution of the kinetic struggle between commerce and virtue. H enry Nash Smith51 has isolated the phrase “ the fee-simple empire,” as emblematic of the geopolitical and millennialist rhetoric of the farm­ ing W est which was rife in nineteenth-century America; and, with its echoes of what W ebster had to say in 1787, the phrase may explain for us w h y a purely agrarian republic had to be a commonwealth for expansion. T he Revolutionary generation had made profession of virtue 50 Quoted by Stourzh, p. 230, n. 104. 51 Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and M yth (New York: Vintage Books, n.d., repr. of 1950 ed., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), ch. XII.

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and committed their republic to the escape from corruption, yet had not fu lly detached it from that universe of interest and faction which was taken to be the sign of the corruption that commerce engendered. Harrington, as W ebster seems to have recalled, had laid it down that commerce did not corrupt so long as it did not overbalance land; but since his day, commerce had become recognized as a dynamic princi­ ple, progressive and at the same time corrupting. A republic which desired to reconcile virtue with commerce must be equally dynamic and expansive in the search for land. “ The growth of Oceana” could “ give laws to the sea,” and escape the fates of both Venice and Rome, only if the sea led to empty or depopulated lands for settlement; but in America the oceanic crossing had been made, and the land awaited occupation b y simple popular expansion. Daniel Boone need not be Lycurgus or Romulus and make laws, and part of the hatred later felt for Mormons probably arose because their prophets insisted on being legislators. A n infinite supply of land, ready for occupation by an armed and self-directing yeom anry, meant an infinite supply of virtue, and it could even be argued that no agrarian law was necessary; the safety valve was open, and all pressures making for dependence and cor­ ruption would right themselves. In these conditions virtue might seem to be self-guaranteeing, and the kind of intelligence displayed b y the legislator as demiurge super­ fluous. A romanticization of popular energies, akin to the romanticism which W ood detects in Madisonian liberalism, makes its appearance in frontier rhetoric; but, follow ing the paradigms laid down b y Machia­ velli, virtue in this sense must be as dynamic as popular virtu. A dynamism of virtue was being invoked to counter and contain the dynamism of commerce, and must partake of the latter’s passionate and fantastic qualities. T he primitive and half-comic heroes of frontier legend, however, were insufficiently political to embody virtue in its republican form — D avy Crockett was not imaginable as the congress­ man he was in real life— and the m yth found its personification in Andrew Jackson.52 Frontier warrior turned patriot statesman, success­ ful adversary o f the second attempt to charter the United States Bank, the Jackson of legend has a good claim to be considered the last of the Machiavellian Romans and the warlike, expanding, agrarian democ­ racy he symbolized a Fourth Rome, perpetuating republican virtus as the Third Rom e of M oscow perpetuated sacred empire. Jefferson is recorded as commenting on the ill-conceived W ar of 18 12 : 52 John William W ard, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an A ge (New York: Oxford University Press, 19 5 5 ); see also Marx, op.cit., pp. 219-20. 535

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Our enemy has indeed the consolation of Satan on removing our first parents from Paradise: from a peaceable and agricultural nation, he makes us a military and manufacturing one.53 But after that rather meaningless conflict had been officially brought to a settlement, it was suddenly escalated into the domain o f myth, and transformed from a corrupting and progressive war into a virtuous and archaic one, b y the crowning m ercy of the Battle of N e w Orleans, in which frontier riflemen, the legendary “ Hunters of K entucky,” in the role of rustic citizen warriors, were supposed to have triumphed over the veterans of a great professional army. John W illiam W ard, in his study of the Jackson m yth which grew up over the next two dec­ ades, brings out clearly how much of it was based on allusion to the heroes of early Rom e— familiar figures of every schoolbook and patri­ otic oration— and on the traditional contrast between virtuous militia and corrupt standing army. A t the same time that Clausewitz was for­ mulating a great idealist theory of war as the instrument of the demo­ cratic and bureaucratic state, Americans were propounding a view of it which was civic and archaic, Machiavellian and at the same moment romantic. W ard further shows how significant were the elements of primitivism and dynamism— of democratic anti-intellectualism— which the myth contained. A mysterious and incalculable force was supposed to have flashed from the warriors of K entucky and confounded the mere skill, experience, and reliance on material power— what Cromwell might have called the mere “ carnal reason” — of their foes at N ew Orleans; and it was much insisted on that this spirit was that of patriot­ ism, and that patriotism was a spirit. W ard rightly stresses that romanti­ cism o f this sort is part of an ethos of egalitarianism; the force which places natural and popular energy on a par with training, experience, and intellect must be of the order of spirit as opposed to reason. But at the same time there is an unmistakable kinship with the dynamic and military virtu of the Machiavellian popolo. The spirit animating the riflemen, when seen as embodied in the person of Jackson himself, is many times termed virtue; but when Jackson is regularly praised as a general who won victories without attending to the formalities of inter­ national law, a president who made laws and decisions without attend­ ing to constitutional niceties, it is clear that we are dealing with a leader of virtu in a highly Machiavellian sense. “ Jackson made law ,” remarked an admirer; “ Adams quoted it.” He was commenting on a reputed outburst by the hero which ran: “ Damn Grotius! damn Pufendorf! damn Vattel! This is a mere matter between Jim Monroe and 53 Quoted by Marx, p. 144.

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m yself!” 54 Or again: “ John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it.” Machiavelli might indeed have been appreciative; but he might also have pointed out that this sort of impetuosity was proper in a legisla­ tor founding a republic, or a prince operating where there was none, but in a magistrate supposed to uphold the public authority could prove extremely corrupting. Given that classical history was still every man’s textbook of politics, one can see that Jackson’s adversaries had reason to dread in him the m ilitary adventurer turned tyrant, and one may even feel that his virtue must have been real to withstand so much intoxicating praise of its superhuman qualities; he must have been a Furius Camillus, since he did not become a Manlius Capitolinus. But it is anomalous in Machiavellian terms that a republic should have gen­ erated, and benefited from, an almost anarchic hero such as this, when it was not new or declining, but in its second generation of normal functioning. A contemporary explanation, o f which W ard rightly makes much, was that the Constitution, being founded on the principles of nature, had released the energies of man as he naturally was; Ja ck ­ son was nature’s child, and the republic of the wilderness had nothing to fear from him.55 W ard, however, draws the orthodox conclusion that the Am erican m yth was one of Lockean primitivism— the revolt of nature against history, which is to say against the traditions, conven­ tions, and intellectualisms of an Old W orld. Expressions of this view were and are exceedingly common; we are concerned, however, to ask whether this escape into nature is to be properly understood outside the complexities and ambiguities of virtue. Jackson’s Am erica was also the America observed b y Tocqueville. W hile the aggressive virtii of agrarian warriors throve on the frontiers, there was visible further east the culmination of that popular revolt against the natural aristocracies which we have learned to call the “ decline of virtue” and the “ end of classical politics” ; and we m ay ask if there was any relation between the two. Tocqueville charted the transition from equality in its Machiavellian or Montesquieuan sense— isonomia or equality of subjection to the res publica— which had been part of the ideal o f virtue, to that egalite des conditions which he saw as marking the triumph of dem ocracy in its modern sense, superseding the values of the classical republic. He went altogether beyond the simply republican fear that a Jackson might turn out a Manlius or a Caesar, and pointed out that the real danger of tyranny in the postvirtuous society lay in the dictatorship of m ajority opinion. W hen men had been differentiated and had expressed their virtue in the act of 54 W ard, p. 63.

55 W ard, pp. 30-45. 537

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deferring to one another’s virtues, the individual had known himself through the respect shown by his fellows for the qualities publicly recognized in him; but once men were, or it was held that they ought to be, all alike, his only means of self-discovery lay in conforming to everybody else’s notions of what he ought to be and was. This pro­ duced a despotism of opinion, since nothing but diffused general opin­ ion now defined the ego or its standards of judgment. Madison had feared that the individual might lose all sense of his own significance;56 and Tocqueville could have observed that Tom Paine, after escaping the English law of treason and the French reign of terror, had been destroyed by the disapproval of his American neighbors. This critique of egalite des conditions is basically Aristotelian: it is pointed out in the Politics that when men are treated as all alike, we fail to take account of them in those respects in which they are not alike; and it could have been pointed out further that a society in which every man is subservient to every other man, because dependent on him for any means of judging his own existence, is corrupt within the accepted meaning of the word, in a very special w ay and to a very high degree. The cult of Jacksonian will and natural energy may turn out to be part of this society, because virtu in the romantic sense is a means of undermining the virtue of the natural aristocracies; but it is a characteristic of the Tocquevillian world that false images of men are very easy to produce and exchange, since men have nothing to live b y except each other’s images. Here it would be proper to reflect that the myths of Jackson and the other frontier heroes were in part consciously manufactured b y not invisible image-makers; that Jackson was a planter and not a frontiersman, who won his victory at N ew Orleans b y artil­ lery and not rifle fire; that if he successfully presented himself as hero and Adams as intellectual in 1828, his image met its ape in 1840, when the W higs succeeded in manufacturing a hero of their own in H arri­ son, who signalized his essentially unreal character b y catching cold at his own inauguration and dying in a month. It was a severe display of the ironies of history, though his admirers might have reflected that A ndrew Jackson was not mocked; and it raises once again the question whether the moment of nature is not a means of escape from a conflict between virtue and corruption, felt as inherent in America since its beginnings. Let us resume exegesis of the text cited from Jefferson’s N otes on Virginia. Commerce— the progress of the arts— corrupts the virtue of agrarian man; but, W ebster had added and Jefferson had agreed, an agrarian society can absorb commerce, and an expanding agrarian 56 W ood, p. 612.

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society can absorb an expanding commerce. America is the w orld’s garden; there is an all but infinite reservoir of free land, and expansion to fill it is the all but infinite expansion of virtue. T h e rhetoric o f Smith’s Virgin Land , filling the century after Jefferson and W ebster, is the rhetoric of this expansion of arms-bearing and liberty-loving husbandmen; the rhetoric, it may be added, of Berkeley’s “ westward course,” helping to explain the archetypal status assumed b y that poem in American thought. The justification of frontier expansion is thus Machiavellian, and in the myth of Jackson it is seen to entail a Machia­ vellian virtu which w ill extend virtue without corrupting it— a process possible in the fee-simple empire. The serpent has entered Eden— once more necessitating virtu — in the sense that commerce has formed part o f the Am erican scene since before the republic began. But on the premise that expanding land is uncorrupted b y expanding commerce, the latter can add its dynamic and progressive qualities to the dynamic expansiveness of agrarian virtii, and be seen as contributory to the image of a farm er’s empire, at once progressive and pastoral. T h e syn­ thesis of virtue and virtii , achieved by Polybius and Machiavelli in their more sanguine moments, is recreated in the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition at a far higher level of sociological complexity and hence of optimism. Th e extent to which the Constitution entailed an abandon­ ment of virtue is more than compensated for b y the virtii of the frontier. The rhetoric of the yeoman— America as the new Gothic empire— has always room in it for the rhetoric of the steam-engine; we may recall the “ march of mind” and the “ Steam Intellect Society” satirized b y Thomas Love Peacock in contemporary Britain. Since frontier and industry, land and commerce, are both expansive forces, they can both be described in terms of passion and dynamism: the patriotic virtii of the warrior yeoman for the former, the passionate and restless pursuit of interest for the latter. So long as the partnership of expansion lasts, the plunge into nature can be described simultaneously in pastoral and industrial terms; for what the American is in search of is not the nature to be contemplated in Arcadian scenery— though this option is never finally closed off— but his own nature as a man, which is civic, military, commercial, and in a word active. If he invokes Lockean paradigms at this point, it is the complex history of the vita activa which has defined this as the point at which to do so.57 The wilderness, furthermore, is matter to be shaped into form; his nature as yeoman, warrior, and citizen is not fulfilled until after he has formed it. The intention of the frontiersman is ideally to become a 57 Marx, op.cit., passim, is an excellent statement of this theme. 539

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yeoman, although this is one point at which a romantic tension is pos­ sible; and the intimation we found in Jefferson that virtue is possible only at a Rousseauan moment in the progress of civilization is carried further in the numerous panoramas— pictorial and verbal— at which the agrarian and civic ideal is presented as occupying a “ middle land­ scape” between the extremes of wilderness savagery and metropolitan corruption.58 The image of the polis is therefore always in part A rca­ dian, though in markedly lesser part contemplative. A further corollary is that since the moving frontier is at any moment an intermediate zone between savagery and virtue, there is always the problem of those whose virtu impels them to go beyond it, preferring unshaped matter to shaped form, potentiality to actuality, until their own natures are left incomplete and m ay degenerate. Fenimore Cooper depicted the aging Leatherstocking in such a dilemma, hesitant between the worlds o f the hunter and the farmer, natural virtue and settled law ;59 and Burke must have had something of the sort in mind when he imagined settlers beyond the Appalachians degenerating into a nomad cavalry and raiding the farming frontier.60 Experience on the ground, besides, provided as early as Crevecoeur’s Letters61 occasion for seeing the fron­ tier squatter as an ignoble savage, squalidly degenerate rather than bar­ barously natural; the poor white began his career in the conceptual context of eighteenth-century sociology. But these problems appeared ideally only as offering reasons w h y the frontier should not cease to expand. So long as the settlement of new land was possible, the partnership between agrarian virtue and commercial industry could be maintained and could perpetuate the illu­ sion that the American “ new man” had reentered Eden. The national apocalyptic could be affirmed at this primary level of optimism. There remained, however, the problem prophetically discerned b y Berkeley: that of the closed and cyclical nature of world history. America must be the fifth and last act in the translatio imperii, because once the “ west­ ward course” was complete it was not conceivable in m erely agrarian terms that it should begin again. The quest for agrarian virtue was the quest for a static utopia, imaginable only as a rinnovazione, a renewal of virtue for those who could find lands on which to renew it. In these terms, Machiavelli had been prophetically (but not Christianly) right: the amount of virtue there could be in the world at any one time was finite, and when it was used up there must be catastrophe before 58 The “middle landscape” is discussed by Marx, pp. 121-22 and passim. 59 Smith, Virgin Land, pp. 64-76. 60 Burke, W orks, 11, 131-32; Smith, pp. 201-208. 61 Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, E very­ man’s Library edition (London: J. M. Dent, 1912-62), pp. 46-47, 51-55.

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renewal— a Stoic conflagration rather than a Christian apocalypse. If the Republicans were, as Tuveson suggests, less millennially minded than the Federalists, this could have been because, with Jefferson, they hoped for an almost infinite renewal of virtue in the fee-simple empire; but beyond this expanding utopia could be discerned only a Machia­ vellian, not a Christian eschatology. And the end of utopia must be reached. There are passages in Jefferson’s writings where he admits that sooner or later the reservoir of land must be exhausted and the expan­ sion of virtue will no longer keep ahead of the progress of commerce.62 W hen that point is reached, the process of corruption must be resumed; men will become dependent upon each other in a market economy and dependent on government in great cities. The serpent will have over­ taken Adam and Eve, and the dark forces symbolized b y Hamilton and Burr, or the more subtle processes described b y Tocqueville, will be unchecked by the expansion of husbandry. W hen manners are cor­ rupt, not even the Constitution can be counted upon. Even in America, the republic faces the problem of its own ultimate finitude, and that of its virtue, in space and time. There is thus a dimension of historical pessimism in American thought at its most utopian, which stems from the confrontation of virtue and commerce and threatens to reduce all American history to a Machiavellian or Rousseauan moment.63 It is because Jefferson’s hus­ bandmen, when all is said and done, occupy only a moment in the dialectic of progress and corruption that he has no alternative to describing them as the “ chosen people” and “ peculiar deposit” of God. T h ey are not, after all, guaranteed b y nature, and their moment of virtue can be prolonged and sustained only by grace or providence. Jefferson was capable of appealing to providence, but not to millennial prophecy; both his deism and his agrarianism assured that; for civic virtue, as we have repeatedly seen, while occasionally requiring an apocalyptic fram ework for its self-assertion, has an equally strong tendency to substitute its own moment for any but an immediately expected millennium. It is therefore of interest to take up Tuveson’s generalization concerning the association between millennialism and the Federalists. On the one hand, this may have obtained because Fed­ eralists, regarding the decline of virtue with Catonian severity, saw men as subject to greater temptations and few er secular guarantees, and therefore as standing in greater need of grace, than did those of Je f ­ ferson’s persuasion; but on the other, Tuveson significantly stresses the prominence accorded to Commerce in the millennial poetry of the 62 Smith, pp. 241-44. 63 Cf. Politics, Language and T im e,'pp. 100-105. 541

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Federalist Tim othy D w ight.64 Commerce is the dynamic power, the virtu, which ensures that nature will not sustain the agrarian utopia forever and that the aid of grace must be invoked; but given the part­ nership of virtue and commerce in westward expansion, it can also be a means of thrusting toward the millennium which grace will afford and taking it by storm. There was even a mood in which it was seen as breaking out of the reservoir of western land, overcoming its finitude, transcending the closed cycle of virtue, and attaining a truly American millennium. Am ong the constants in the literature of American m ythology brought to light b y H enry Nash Smith is the repetition of prophecies that the fee-simple empire would not only perpetuate the virtue of a farming yeom anry, but generate a commerce designed to exceed con­ tinental limits and, b y opening up the markets of Asia, bring about the liberation of the most ancient of human societies.65 “ There is the east; there is India,” declared Thomas Hart Benton, pointing due west before an audience in St. Louis,66 and the enlightenment o f Japan and China through commerce was foretold more frequently still. It was in the context of the fee-simple union of virtue and commerce that Am er­ ica’s global role was prophesied; and the global role, it was maintained, would assure the perpetuation of that union even after the Pacific shores had been reached. The liberation of Asia (W hitman’s “ venerable priestly Asia” ), furthermore, is part of the vision of America as “ redeemer nation” ; and the reason is plainly that it would break the closed circle in which Berkeley had confined America and would trans­ form the closing fifth act of his translatio into a truly millennial Fifth M onarchy. “ In the beginning,” Locke had written—inadvertently earn­ ing his place as a prophet of the new apocalypse— “ all the world was Am erica” ;67 and if in the end all the world should be America again, the mission of a chosen people would have been fulfilled. Virtue and commerce, liberty and culture, republic and history would have ren­ dered their partnership perpetual b y the only possible means— that of engaging all mankind perpetually in it; and in so doing would have attained to that blend of millennium and utopia which was the out­ come of the early modern secularization of biblical prophecy. 64 Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, pp. 103-12. 65 Smith, Book 1, “ Passage to India,” pp. 16-53. 66 William N . Chambers, Old Bullion Benton: Senator from the N ew West (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1956), p. 353. Strictly speaking, Benton imagined a statue of Columbus pointing west, but we may feel sure that he pointed too. It is a historical irony that a statue of him in the act was erected in a part of St. Louis which urban decay has made somewhat rarely visited. See also Smith, pp. 23-35. 67 Locke, T w o Treatises of Government, 11, 49. 542

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T he Am erican apocalypse is not inherently more absurd than those entertained in other cultures, which present themselves as embodying the last stage of some unified scheme of human history and as about to attain utopia through the working out of that scheme’s final dialectic. But because the movement of American history has been spatial rather than dialectical, its apocalypse has been early modern rather than historicist; it has been envisaged in the form of a movement out of history, followed b y a regenerative return to it, so that there have been per­ petuated in Am erican thinking those patterns of messianic and cyclical thought with which this book has been concerned. For if the liberation of Asia should not come about, the partnership of virtue and commerce would have failed and the cycle of history would be closed again. The chosen people would be imprisoned in time for lack of a theater for further expansion and the pursuing forces of commerce would once more turn corruptive, imposing upon them the imperial government desired b y Hamilton in the eighteenth century and described as the “ military-industrial complex” b y Eisenhower in the twentieth, or the condition of universal dependence feared b y Jefferson and analyzed by Tocqueville. W hen the chosen people failed of their mission, they were by definition apostate, and the jeremiad note so recurrent in American history would be sounded again. It would call for the internal cleansing and regeneration of the “ city on a hill,” since the politics of sectarian withdrawal and communal renewal form a standing alternative to those of millennial leadership; “ come out of her, m y people” might be heard again in the form of G eorge M cG overn’s “ come home, Am erica” ; but there would simultaneously be heard a variety of neo-Machiavellian voices offering counsel on the proper blend of prudence and audacity to display in a world where virtue was indeed finite. Th e fate of Rome began to be invoked b y the anti-imperialists of 1898, and has been invoked since. The twentieth-century intellect distrusts metahistory for many rea­ sons, nearly all of them good, but American culture has been suffi­ ciently pervaded b y metahistorical ways of thinking to make the ability to reconstruct eschatological scenarios a useful tool in interpreting it. W e can see, in the light of the scheme provided here, w h y it was nec­ essary, both at the beginnings of the Jeffersonian perspective and as it took further shape, to reject Alexander Hamilton as a false prophet and even a kind of Antichrist; he looked east, not west,68 saw America as commercial empire rather than agrarian republic, and proclaimed that corruption was inescapable, that the cycle was closed and the end 68 He spoke of Canada as on “our left,” Florida on “ our right” (Stourzh, p. 195). See also Felix Gilbert, T o the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (Princeton University Press, 1961, 1970). 543

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had come, before the covenant was fairly sealed or the experiment in escaping corruption had begun. W e can further see w h y it was that Frederick Jackson Turner adopted the tones of an American Isaiah when proclaiming the closing of the frontier in 1890; one phase in the prophetic scheme, one revolution of the wheel in the struggle between virtue and corruption, was drawing to an end. It is also intelligible that there is now an interpretation of American history since that era, which proposes that after 1890 the choice lay between internal reformation on the one hand and oceanic empire on the other, leading to the libera­ tion of Asia b y trade through an Open D oor;69 and that the apparent rejection of America by Asia in the third quarter of the twentieth cen­ tury is seen as leading to a profound crisis in self-perception, in which the hope of renewed innocence and recovered virtue is felt (once again) to have gone forever and the national jeremiad is sounded in peculiarly anguished terms. The Machiavellian note is audible when Americans reproach themselves, as they have at intervals since at latest 1898, with exercising the “ tyranny of a free people” and imposing the empire of virtue on those who are not to receive full citizenship within it.70 But it is also significant that the jeremiad has at times taken the form of a quarrel with the Constitution itself, and more recently of a quarrel with a “ Lockean consensus,” a politics of pragmatic adjustment and a political science of the empirical study of behavior, all of which are seen— however exaggeratedly— as underlying the edifice of the republic since its beginnings and as contributing to that state of affairs which it is the object of the jeremiad to denounce as corruption. The tensions between political practice and the values to which it must answer sometimes grow so great that Americans lose that delight in both the practice and the contemplation of politics in the Madisonian manner which normally characterizes them. The language of practice has not been republican in the classical sense, but the language of myth and metahistory has ensured the repetition of dilemmas first perceived in the eighteenth century; and what is often stated as a quarrel with 69 E.g., Max Silberschmidt, The United States and Europe: Rivals and Partners (N ew York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972). Is it worth remarking that the “ open door” of China policy in the W est recalls words on the plinth of the Statue of Liberty in the East? 70 See, for example, William Graham Sumner in 1896: “ Our system is unfit for the government of subject provinces. They have no place in it. They would become seats of corruption, which would react on our own body politic. If we admitted the island [Cuba] as a state or a group of states, we should have to let it help govern us.” Cited in Lloyd C. Gardner (ed.), A Different Frontier: selected readings in the foundations of American economic expansion (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966), p. 87. Also Robert L. Beisner, T w elve Against Em pire: the Anti-Imperialists, 1898-1900 (New York: M cGraw Hill, 1968).

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Locke is in reality a quarrel with Madison’s solution to these dilemmas. Am erican political scientists currently see themselves as passing through a “ post-behavioral revolution,” 71 but much of the language of that movement is recognizable as the language of jeremiad; and a post­ jeremiad revolution in the field of ideology would in some respects be more drastic still. It would signal the end of the Machiavellian moment in Am erica— the end, that is, of the quarrel with history in its distinc­ tively American form. But what would succeed that perspective is hard to imagine— the indications of the present point inconclusively toward various kinds of conservative anarchism— and its end does not seem to have arrived.

[iv] It is notorious that American culture is haunted b y myths, many of which arise out of the attempt to escape history and then regenerate it. The conventional wisdom among scholars who have studied their growth has been that the Puritan covenant was reborn in the Lockean contract, so that Locke himself has been elevated to the station of a patron saint of American values and the quarrel with history has been seen in terms of a constant attempt to escape into the wilderness and repeat a Lockean experiment in the foundation of a natural society.72 The interpretation put forw ard here stresses Machiavelli at the expense of Locke; it suggests that the republic— a concept derived from Renais­ sance humanism— was the true heir of the covenant and the dread of corruption the true heir o f the jeremiad. It suggests that the foundation of independent Am erica was seen, and stated, as taking place at a Machiavellian— even a Rousseauan— moment, at which the fragility of the experiment, and the ambiguity of the republic’s position in secular time, was more vividly appreciated than it could have been from a Lockean perspective. Th e foundation of the republic, this interpretation suggests, was not seen in terms o f a simple return to nature— Crevecoeur to the contrary notwithstanding— but as constituting an ambivalent and contradictory moment within a dialectic o f virtue and corruption, familiar to most 71 David C. Easton, “The N ew Revolution in Political Science” (presidential address to the American Political Science Association), American Political Science Review 73, no. 4 (1969), 1051-61. See also Graham and Carey (eds.), The PostBehavioral Era: Perspectives on Political Science (N ew York: David M cKay, 1972). 72 David W . Noble, Historians Against H istory: The Frontier Thesis and the National Covenant in American Historical W riting since 1830 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965). 545

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sophisticated minds of the eighteenth century. There was indeed a flight from history into nature, conceived by many Americans of the revolutionary and early national periods— and with less excuse b y a succession of historians lasting to this day— in terms of a flight from the Old W orld, from the burden of a priestly and feudal past (Adam s’s “ canon and feudal laws” ); but the analysis of corruption makes it clear that what was involved was a flight from modernity and a future no less than from antiquity and a past, from commercial and W higgish Britain— the most aggressively “ modern” society of the mid-eighteenth century— no less than from feudal and popish Europe; just as the nature into which Americans precipitated themselves was not simply a Puritan, Lockean, or Arcadian wilderness, but that vita activa in which the zoon politikon fulfilled his nature, but which since Machiavelli had grown steadily harder to reconcile with existence in secular time. Because the neo-Harringtonian version of the Machiavellian moment was one from which superstition, vassalage, and paper-money speculation could be beheld and condemned at a single glance, the old and new versions of corruption could be telescoped into one; and because the American republic could be seen in terms of rinnovazione in a N e w W orld, it was natural to see the departure from corruption as a single gesture of departure from a past— which encouraged the illusion that it led toward a nature which was unhistorical because its future was unproblematical. But this entailed much distortion of history, surviving in the determina­ tion of American historians writing in this vein, even today, to equate Britain with Europe and the W hig empire with the ancien regim e.12. T he dialectic of virtue and commerce was a quarrel with modernity, most fully articulated— at least until the advent of Rousseau— within the humanist and neo-Harringtonian vocabularies employed b y the English-speaking cultures of the N orth Atlantic; and it was in those vocabularies and within the ambivalences of those cultures that Am eri­ can self-consciousness originated and acquired its terminology. T h e civil war and revolution which disrupted the English-speaking Atlantic after 1774 can be seen as involving a continuation, larger and more irreconcilable, of that Augustan debate which accompanied the Financial Revolution in England and Scotland after 1688 and issued after 17 14 in the parliamentary oligarchy of Great Britain. T h e fear of encroaching corruption helped drive the Americans to the renewal of virtue in a republic and the rejection of the parliamentary monarchy from which, all agreed, some measure of corruption was inseparable; and the confrontation of virtue with corruption constitutes the Machia­ 73 Hartz, op.cit., regrettably passim, and R. R . Palmer, The A ge of the Demo­ cratic Revolution, vol. 1 (Princeton University Press, 1959), chs. 2, 3, 6, 10.

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vellian moment. Britain, on the other hand, adhered to the course marked out b y all but the radical dissentients within the W h ig tradi­ tion. Under the N orth, Rockingham, and Shelburne ministries, the political classes were in no doubt that parliamentary monarchy was a form of government to be retained; the issue was whether, in order to retain it, the better course was to fight the colonies or let them go.74 Loud and threatening though the Country voices were in the crisis of 1 780-1 781,75 the Court thesis concerning the character of British gov­ ernment was not in real jeopardy. Unlike the Americans, dominated by neo-Harringtonian conceptual structures, the British, inured b y the Court ideology to seeing themselves as less committed to the profession of virtue, attempted no revolutionary rinnovazione, did not see the loss of an empire as pointing to irretrievable decline, and were able within a few years to embark on another long period of European war, military professionalism, and inflationary banking. If the younger Pitt resembles Hamilton, there is no British Jefferson. Democratization, when it came, arrived by the medieval technique of expanding the king-in-parliament to include new categories of counselors and representatives. American independence was therefore followed b y a fairly rapid divergence of the political languages spoken in the two principal cul­ tures of the now sundered Atlantic. Christopher W yvill, Richard Price, and John Cartwright, it is true, employed a vocabulary of cor­ ruption and renovation little different from that of their American contemporaries,76 and “ Old Corruption” continued to be the target of radical reformers until perhaps the days of the Chartists. But Jerem y Bentham’s Fragm ent on Governm ent— conceived, as its assault on Blackstone shows, as a radical rejection of the language of Court and Country alike— was written, as was the Declaration of Independence, in the year when T h e Wealth of Nations was first published and Hume died; and b y 1780 Edmund Burke had perceived that eighteenthcentury thought about manners and customs could be restated in the seventeenth-century language of prescriptive antiquity and the Ancient Constitution, and used to attack the notion of Machiavellian ridurre, 74 The most trenchant statements of the latter view came from Josiah Tucker; see his Four Tracts on Political and Commercial Subjects (1774), A Letter to Edmund Burke, Esq. (1775), The True Interest of Britain (1776), A Treatise Concerning Civil Government (178 1). 75 H. Butterfield, George 111, Lord North and the People, 1779-80 (London: G . Bell, 1949). 76 Ian R. Christie, Wilkes, W yvill and Reform : The Parliamentary Move?nent in British Politics, 1760-1785 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1962) and M yth and Reality in Late Eighteenth-Century British Politics (Berkeley: University of Cali­ fornia Press, 1970); F. D. Cartwright, The L ife and Correspondence of Major Cartwright (London, 1826). 547

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as later that of the Rights of Man.77 Prescriptive conservatism and radical utilitarianism— whose antecedents are Court more than they are Country— could both be employed to diminish the influence of the Crown; but both were as far as they could be from the ideal of repub­ lican virtue perpetuated b y the Americans. A history could therefore be written— though it cannot be attempted here— of how British thought diverged from American, and from Augustan neoclassicism, in the half-century following the American Revolution. A n ironic feature of such a history would surely be the high degree of success with which Victorian parliamentary legislation set about eliminating that corruption and its image which had been to all men, and to Americans remained, such an obsession. In this respect the British could and did feel well rewarded for their adherence, at the price of a disrupted Atlantic and an Anglo-Irish union, to the paradigm of parliamentary sovereignty over that of republican bal­ ance; the Americans, having made the republican commitment to the renovation of virtue, remained obsessively concerned b y the threat of corruption— with, it must be added, good and increasing reason. Their political drama continues, in w ays both crude and subtle, to endorse the judgment of Polybius, Guicciardini, Machiavelli, and Montesquieu in identifying corruption as the disease peculiar to republics: one not to be cured b y virtue alone. In the melodrama of 1973, the venality of an A gn ew makes this point in one w ay; an Ehrlichman’s more complex and disinterested misunderstanding of the relation between the reality and the morality of power makes it in another. T h e Americans, then, inherited rhetorical and conceptual structures which ensured that venality in public officials, the growth of a militaryindustrial complex in government, other-directedness and one-dimensionality in individuals, could all be identified in terms continuous with those used in the classical analysis of corruption, the successive civichumanist denunciations of Caesar and Lorenzo de’ Medici, M arl­ borough, W alpole, and Hamilton. This language remains in many ways well suited to the purposes for which it is used; the case against the modern hypertrophy of Madisonian adjustive politics can be, and is, admirably made in terms of the Guicciardinian paradigm of corrup­ tion; but the historian notes that it serves at the same time to perpetuate the singular persistence of early modern values and assumptions in Am erican culture. W hile the cult of Spartan and Roman antiquity among French revolutionaries was helping to generate the vision of a despotism of virtue through terror,78 while German idealism was restat77 See Politics, Language and Tim e, ch. 6, “Burke and the Ancient Constitution: A Problem in the History of Ideas.” 78 Harold T . Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries: A

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ing the quarrel between value and history in terms of a vision of reason as the w orking out of history’s contradictions within the self,79 and while the British were developing an ideology of administrative reform which claimed— in the face of a generally triumphant Burkean counter­ point— to reduce history to a science,80 the unique conditions of the continental republic and its growth were perpetuating the Augustan tension between virtue and commerce, the Puritan tension between election and apostasy, the Machiavellian tension between virtue and expansion, and in general the humanist tension between the active civic life and the secular time-continuum in which it must be lived. Hence the persistence in America of messianic and jeremiad attitudes toward history; hence also, in part, the curious extent to which the most post­ modern and post-industrial of societies continues to venerate pre-mod­ ern and anti-industrial values, symbols, and constitutional forms, and to suffer from its awareness of the tensions between practice and morality. Hegel is on record as commenting upon the United States of his time that though a vital and grow ing political culture, it as yet lacked any­ thing which he could recognize as a “ state.” He resorted, however, to the proto-Turnerian explanation that the safety valve of the frontier accounted for the absence of class conflicts, and the prognosis that when the land was filled urbanization, a standing army, and class con­ flicts would begin, a true “ state” would be necessitated, and the dialec­ tic of history as he understood it would begin to operate.81 This prophecy can be very readily transposed into a Marxist key; but it is notorious that it has vet to be fulfilled. Classical Marxist class conflict has been even slower to develop in America than in other advanced industrial societies, and if Herbert Marcuse be accepted as the most significant Marxist theoretician to operate out of an American context, his Marxism is post-industrial, romantic, and pessimistic. T h e fact is not, as we have seen, that a complacent Lockean liberalism has led American thought to state too narrow ly the quarrel of the self with history; it is that this quarrel has been, and has continued to be, expressed in a pre­ modern and pre-industrial form, and has never taken the shape of a rigorous Hegelian or Marxian commitment to a dialectic of historical conflict. T he St. Louis Hegelians, it has recently been shown, were Study in the Development of the Revolutionary Spirit (Chicago University Press, I 9 3 7 ) *

79 George Armstrong Kelly, Idealism, Politics and History: Sources of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1969). 80 Crane Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). 81 G .W .F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of H istory, tr. J. Sibree (New York: Colonial Press, 1900), pp. 85-87. 549

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romantic ideologues o f a consciousness-expanding urban frontier, inheritors of the geopolitical messianism described b y Tuveson and Smith;82 and the more academic Hegelian philosophers who succeeded them were never ideologues at all. American metahistory has remained the rhetoric of a spatial escape and return, and has never been that of a dialectical process. In terms borrowed from or suggested b y the language of Hannah Arendt,83 this book has told part of the story of the revival in the early modern W est of the ancient ideal of homo politicus (the zdon politikon of Aristotle), who affirms his being and his virtue b y the medium of political action, whose closest kinsman is homo rhetor and whose antithesis is the homo credens of Christian faith. Follow ing this debate into the beginnings of modern historicist sociology, we have been led to study the complex eighteenth-century controversy between homo politicus and homo mercator, whom we saw to be an offshoot and not a progenitor— at least as regards the history of social perception— of homo creditor. T h e latter figure was defined and to a large degree discredited b y his failure to meet the standards set b y homo politicus, and eighteenth-century attempts to construct a bourgeois ideology contended none too successfully with the primacy already enjoyed b y a civic ideology; even in America a liberal w ork ethic has historically suffered from the guilt imposed on it b y its inability to define for itself a virtue that saves it from corruption; the descent from Daniel Boone to W illy Loman is seen as steady and uninterrupted. But one figure from the Arendtian gallery is missing, curiously enough, from the his­ tory even of the American w ork ethic: the homo faber of the E uro­ pean idealist and socialist traditions, who served to bridge the gap between the myths of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. It is not yet as clear as it might be how the emergence of this figure is related to the European debate between virtue and commerce; but because indus­ trial labor in Am erica conquered a wilderness rather than transforming an ancient agrarian landscape, homo faber in this continent is seen as conquering space rather than transforming history, and the American w ork force has been even less willing than the European to see itself as a true proletariat. The ethos of historicist socialism has consequently been an importation o f transplanted intellectuals (even the martyr Jo e H ill left word that he “ had lived as an artist and would die as an 82 William H. Goetzmann, ed., The American Hegelians: A n Intellectual E pi­ sode in the History of Western America (New York: Alfred A . Knopf, 1973). 83 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (New York: Viking, 1958), and Peter Fuss, “ Hannah Arendt’s Conception of Political Community,” Idealistic Studies 3, no. 3 (1973), 252-65. 55°

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artist” ), and has remained in many ways subject to the messianic popu­ lisms of the westward movement. Th e quarrel between civic virtue and secular time has been one of the main sources of the W estern awareness of human historicity; but at the same time, the continued conduct of this quarrel— largely because it is anchored in a concern for the moral stability o f the human personality— has perpetuated a pre-modern view of history as a move­ ment aw ay from the norms defining that stability, and so as essentially uncreative and entropic where it does not attain to millennium or utopia. W hen we speak of historicism we mean both an attempt to engage the personality and its integrity in the movement of history, and an attempt to depict history as generating new norms and values. The underlying strength of historicism is— or has been, since the astronauts and ecologists are w orking to close the circle once more— this sense of the secular creativity of history, its linear capacity to bring about inces­ sant qualitative transformations of human life; but the paradox of American thought— on the other hand, the essence of socialist thought — has been a constant moral polemic against the w ay in which this hap­ pens. On one side of the paradox, the civic ideal of the virtuous per­ sonality, uncorrupted b y specialization and committed to the social whole in all its diversity, has formed an important ingredient of the Marxian ideal of the same personality as awaiting redemption from the alienating effects of specialization.84 On another side, however, the socialist and revolutionary thrust has often ended in failure for the reason— one among others— that it threatens to “ force men to be free,” to involve them in history, or in political and historical action, to a degree beyond their capacity for consent. Conservatism involves a denial of activism, a denial that the sphere o f the vita activa is cotermi­ nous with the sphere of societal life. A t this point our study of the quarrel between virtue and commerce has a contribution to offer on the conservative side of the ledger, with which a history being com­ pleted at a profoundly counter-revolutionary point in time may be per­ mitted, without prejudice, to conclude. In the final analysis, the ideal of virtue is highly compulsive; it demands of the individual, under threat to his moral being, that he participate in the res publica and, when the republic’s existence in time is seen to have grow n crucial, in history. W e have found areas of eighteenth-century thought in which the partial withdrawal from citi­ zenship to pursue commerce appeared as a rebellion against virtue and its repressive demands; the republic asked too much of the individual in the form of austerity and autonomy, participation and virtue, and 84 Politics, Language and Tim e, p. 103.

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the diversification of life b y commerce and the arts offered him the world of Pericles in place of that of Lycurgus, a choice worth paying for with a little corruption. The “ liberalism” which some now find an impoverishment did not appear so then. It was already known, how ­ ever, that what was diversification to some was specialization to others, and the socialist tradition has continued to grapple with the confronta­ tion of riches and poverty in this form. Further back still in time, it is apparent that the primacy of politics— the ideal of virtue, already bearing with it the ancient ambivalences of justice and war, virtue and virtii— reappeared in early modern thought in the form of a Christian heresy. In a cosmos shaped by the thought of the Augustinian civitas D ei, it affirmed that man’s nature was politi­ cal and could be perfected in a finite historical frame of action; and the ambiguities of the saeculum, which it thus revived, are with us still as the ambiguities of action in history. T o a Christian it would appear that the primacy of politics was possible only on the blasphemous supposi­ tion that some civitas saecularis could be the civitas Dei. T o a Greek it would appear, more simply still, that every human virtue had its excess, and that civic or political virtue was no exception. There is a freedom to decline moral absolutes; even those of the polis and history, even that of freedom when proposed as an absolute.

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[i] s i n c e t h i s b o o k , published in 19 7 5 , commands after nearly thirty years enough readers to justify a new edition, it clearly stood in no need o f a new introduction. T h e text o f 1975 may still speak for itself, and only confusion could have resulted from an attempt to shape it in the light of the perceptions o f a new century. N ow that the public o f 2003 has had opportunity to read it and form its own responses, however, it may be interesting and even valuable if I supply an account o f its reception, the controversies in which it has been involved, and what seem to be its significances to its author three decades after it was first composed. (It was begun at the University o f Canterbury in N ew Zealand, completed at Washington University in St. Louis, and published after I moved to the Johns Hopkins University in 1974 .) T h e title The Machiavellian Moment was, as mentioned in my introduc­ tion, suggested by my friend Quentin Skinner before he was either P ro­ fessor o f Political Science or Regius Professor o f History at Cambridge University and before he became involved in the historical and philo­ sophical debates which have surrounded this book’s later history. Like his two-volume The Foundations of Modem Political Thought, which appeared in 19 78 ,1 The Machiavellian Moment is thought to demonstrate the method o f writing the history o f its subject attributed to “ the Cambridge school.” On this there exists a considerable methodological and theoretical litera­ ture2 to which I have now little to add, except perhaps to say that whereas

1 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modem Political Thought: Volume I, The Renaissance; Volume II, The Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 1978). Works published since 1975 and appearing in footnotes in this afterword are not listed in the bibliography to this volume, which remains as it was published in I 975- Works listed in the bibliography are not footnoted here. 2 The most detailed critique appears in James Tully and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton University Press, 1988). Visions of Politics, a collection of Skinner’s essays in three volumes (Cam­ bridge University Press, 2002), has been published after this was written. I have published no detailed methodological writings since 1987; see “Introduction: State of the Art” in J.G .A . Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge 553

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this “ school” is generally thought to advocate the return o f texts to the contexts in which they were first written, The Machiavellian Moment pur­ sues after doing this the fortunes of texts, and the discourses they may be said to have conveyed, as they travel from one context to another, in a history which moves from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth and from Florence to England, Scotland, and revolutionary America. Some would describe this as doing the “ history o f ideas,” but I find neither this term nor its connotations satisfactory as an account o f what I have been and am doing; this volume is, however, a history as much diachronic as synchronic. It follows that the term “ moment,” which Skinner originally suggested, has taken on several meanings, although not necessarily those which he intended. It can denote— as I indicate in my original foreword— the his­ toric “ moment” at which Machiavelli appeared and impinged upon think­ ing about politics, and either of two ideal “ moments” indicated by his writings: the moment at which the formation or foundation o f a “ repub­ lic” appears possible or the moment at which its formation is seen to be precarious and entail a crisis in the history to which it belongs. I see these moments as inseparable, and there thus arises “ the Machiavellian moment” as that in which the republic is involved in historical tensions or contradictions which it either generates or encounters. I go on to present much, but not all, o f early modern political thought as the expe­ rience and articulation o f this “ moment.” This book has therefore presented a complex and at times contradic­ tory history, narrating not only the controversies and interactions between opposing belief systems but also the ambivalences and self­ questionings that have arisen within them. It has been written in a com­ plex and discursive style which has not been easy reading; I can defend this only by saying that the story is not meant to be easy to follow and that clarifying it is more a matter o f bringing its complexities to light than o f seeking to simplify it. M uch o f the controversy in which the book has been involved, however— I do not say all of it— seems to have arisen not from mere perplexity but from an actual unwillingness to accept its basic premise: the presence of “ republican” values in early modern his­ tory, and their ongoing debate with other values to which they have been sometimes opposed or with which they have been uneasily allied. Some University Press, 1985), pp. 1-3 6 ; “The Concept of Language and the Metier d’Historien: Some Considerations on Practice,” in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modem Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 19-40; and “Texts as Events: Reflections on the History of Political Thought,” in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (eds.), Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of Cal­ ifornia Press, 1987), pp. 2 1-3 4 . 554

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historians, some political philosophers, and many expositors o f “ liberal” or “American” values have found the “republican” account o f citizenship unduly challenging, and have sought to reduce its presence. Much o f the criticism to which my own work has been exposed has therefore amounted to a search for ways in which I may have said that “ republicanism” was more important than it was and for ways in which it may be represented as less important than I am supposed to have said it was. Some o f this criticism has necessarily been imprecise and confused; the critical reader— who o f course is welcome— may be cautioned against supposing that any criticism is as good as another and asked to be clear about what it is that I have been saying. M uch valuable discussion o f The Machiavellian Moment— let me em­ phasize that there has been much to which the above strictures do not apply— has centered on its association with Hans Baron’s The Crisis o f the Early Italian Renaissance (and later with Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution). I learned much from Baron, without endorsing every contention he put forward. In particular, it was not nec­ essary for me to adopt his belief that the identity o f liberty with active citizenship was realized suddenly by Florentine humanists in the crisis of the war with Giangaleazzo Visconti in 14 0 0 -14 0 2 ; I recall, though I can­ not now document, that in the only correspondence I had with the late Professor Baron he expressed disappointment that I had not endorsed the critical chronology by which he sought to show that humanist writ­ ings expressed this change at that time. It was enough for me to affirm that ideas o f active citizenship were formulated by Florentines, that they could be said to have rested on the ideal of the zdon politikon expressed by Aristotle, and that they had come to be identified with the possession of arms by the citizen. From there I could go on with Baron, and well beyond him, in showing how the history o f Rome, Florence, England, Europe, and civil society in general had come to be rewritten in terms of the rise and fall o f armed and active citizenship. M achiavelli— this is why there is such a thing as “ the Machiavellian moment” — had insisted that the armed citizen was the only truly free man but had not supposed that he was necessarily a good man. Roman history was the record o f how this citizen had used his liberty to establish empire over others but had been corrupted by that empire to the point where he had lost liberty first and empire afterward. Leonardo Bruni, and Machiavelli a century later, had considered whether there had been alternative paths that Roman history might have taken, but Machiavelli had decided that it could not have been otherwise, and perhaps should not have been. Liberty was liberty, even if it could not be separated from empire. It is here that The Machiavellian Moment encounters the writings o f Sir Isaiah Berlin, from which it cannot be separated even if I am not 555

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always satisfied by the historical narratives they entail. In a series o f im­ portant essays— of which I became aware sometimes before and some­ times after completing my own book— Berlin argued, first, that M achia­ velli had shown political life as the encounter with diverse value systems between which there could be no final reconciliation; second, that politi­ cal philosophy must continue to be articulated as long as these irrecon­ cilabilities were to be reckoned with; third, that there existed two con­ cepts o f liberty, the one positive, entailing the determination o f self and its encounter with other selves engaged in the same determination, the other negative, entailing no more than the freedom from hindrances to the practice o f social activities in which the encounter with other selves was diversified and rendered manageable by law, government, and cul­ ture.3 It is at the third o f these points that one confronts the differences between “ republican” and “ liberal,” “ ancient” and “modern,” concepts of “ liberty” ; and I see The Machiavellian Moment as concerned with the ten­ sions between them, whose history may be ongoing and without a final outcome. T h e most important and valuable criticism o f Hans Baron’s conten­ tions, and o f mine insofar as they are dependent on his, was put forward a few years later by Quentin Skinner in his Foundations of Modem Political Thought. 4 Baron and I could both be read as suggesting that a Florentine conception of active citizenship had been the first expression o f republi­ can values since the literature of ancient Rome, now undergoing a renais­ sance; certainly Baron contrasted it directly with a medieval concept of sacred empire, which he thought had known no rival for centuries. Skin­ ner, however, brought to light the existence of a rhetoric o f civic virtue, republican citizenship, and good government which had been present since the middle o f the twelfth century at least; the form o f government it entailed had been noted by the historian Otto of Freising about 11 5 4 as needing explanation to his readers north o f the Alps. Here was a con­ cept o f citizenship considered in neither The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance nor The Machiavellian Moment, and Skinner placed Otto’s text among the “ foundations o f modern political thought.” 5 As against what I 3 Isaiah Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli,” in Myron R Gilmore (ed.),

Studies on Machiavelli (Florence: Olschki, 1972), pp. 147-206; “ Does Political Theory Still Exist?” in Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (eds.), Philosophy, Poli­ tics and Society: Second Series (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), pp. 1- 3 3 ; “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). All of these have been recently and posthumously reprinted in Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (eds.), Isaiah Berlin: The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), with further bibliographic information. 4Vol. I, The Renaissance, pp. xiv, 27-28, 42-48, ch. 4 at large, 156. 5 Skinner, vol. I, The Renaissance, pp. 4 -5. 556

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had argued in my work, he emphasized that the language in which this civic discourse was couched was less Aristotelian than Ciceronian, a dis­ tinction o f real theoretical importance. From Aristotle’s Politics— a text well known from at latest the thirteenth century— I selected for emphasis those passages in which citizens are defined as political creatures because they both rule and are ruled, exercising that highest form of rule which is rule over one’s equals, by whose decisions you are bound as they are bound by yours, since you and they have an equal voice in making them. As the reader will know by this time, I saw in this face-to-face equality the imagined root o f all civic virtue, and in its loss, direct or indirect, the root o f all that came to be known as corruption. That many other mes­ sages could be and were extracted from the text o f the Politics did not immediately concern me, and I rejected the contention o f some critics that in mentioning Aristotle I had obliged m yself to give a systematic account o f his doctrines, or their medieval reception, as a whole. That is not necessarily how political texts function in history. In setting Cicero in the place o f Aristotle, Skinner was making several important statements. In the first place, he was suggesting— I would now say, rightly— that my account o f the history o f civic discourse should have been more responsive to the history o f Latin and Roman argument than to the received canon o f the history o f political thought; Romans were not Athenians and should not be treated as mere extensions of that culture. Secondly, and much more far reachingly, Cicero— especially as understood in Renaissance humanism— was a rhetorician, a philosopher, within limits a jurist, and an expositor o f classical culture in its fullness. He was therefore equipped, in ways that Machiavelli was not, to expound the civic life as a participation in all the social and cultural values of which human beings are capable, an activity to which the term “ human­ ism” is often and authoritatively applied. W hether this means that the “ Ciceronian” discourse o f the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had fully anticipated the “ civic humanism” and republican “ liberty” which Hans Baron had seen revealed in fifteenth-century Florence does not concern me here; I mean only to argue that it does not anticipate, and does not reveal in the thirteenth century, what I intend, and find in the thought of Machiavelli, in using the term “ the Machiavellian moment.” T h e work known by that title is concerned with virtus in the Roman sense of the word, and with the Tuscan word virtu as employed by M achi­ avelli in reviving its Roman meaning. It denotes the individual’s capacity for action, including the political and military. Virtu is capable of being used when that capacity is not disciplined by moral or political restraints; this is why Machiavelli can write o f the prince’s virtu when it is being exercised illegitimately. But Romans knew o f virtus as a characteristic of the citizen and thought o f it not only as exercised within a public disci­ 557

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pline but as consisting in a religious respect for that discipline as a good in itself. This was the virtu as Machiavelli called it, which the Romans had possessed and had lost. It was both intensely public and intensely personal, and the case for including it in the category “ civic humanism” is that it identified the citizen’s personal autonomy with his immediate capacity for public action; without the one, he would not have the other. Corruption might set in when he lost his autonomy and became the instrument of a master, or when he devoted his autonomy to the pursuit o f ends other than the public, which might result in his becoming either a master or a servant. In Greek terms, the ideal o f zrirtus was more Spartan than Athenian. It was not until the nineteenth century that the Funeral Oration o f Pericles became a sacred text o f liberal culture, with its claim that Athenians could pursue a diversity of goods in action or in play and still retain their devotion to the public good. But we need not see Romans as Spartans— though it is easy to do so— to realize that we have before us a sharp if not absolute distinction between the political and the social or cultural. T h e political is concerned with action and decision, which are goods in themselves and in the pursuit o f which the actor declares who and what he is; actions and decisions aimed at lesser goods are closer to the charac­ ter o f enjoyment, and a polity or individual taken up with the pursuit o f enjoyment may be termed “luxurious” or “ effeminate.” T h e Ciceronian ideal, located by Skinner in the thirteenth century, does not deserve these epithets and may entail a high degree o f austerity, but it is concerned with all the goods o f which human society is capable and its decisions are aimed at ensuring their just distribution. It is therefore concerned with justice— a term notoriously absent from Machiavelli’s vocabulary, though he cannot be accused of not knowing or caring what it was— rather than with zrirtus, the rigorous self-discipline necessary to autonomy and selfdetermination in the field o f public action. We begin here to encounter— though still at a very great distance— the distinctions between Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts o f liberty, but at the same time we encounter the differences between two nonidentical forms o f political discourse. Virtus must be practiced, though within a public discipline and in a public field, through one’s own actions and in one’s own person, whereas justice, though it may be practiced as a perpetual disposition of one’s personality, can in large measure be prescribed for one by the judge, the prince, or the laws o f which they are mouthpieces. T here is consequently something primal about virtus\ it is the initial selffashioning of the hero immediately after he has become a citizen and accepted the discipline o f an often warlike assembly. Justice on the other hand may imply— though the philosophers challenge the implication— the opulence o f a society, economy, and culture in which there are many 558

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things to do and be, many ways o f doing what one wants, and many ways o f being what one wants to be; it is a question whether, in the pursuit of justice, one acts always in the same role or as the same person. For good and ill, the primal citizen is exposed to fewer of the doubts arising from this question. In the later Greek and Latin literature by which Europeans were ob­ sessed, the Roman republic was depicted— especially by Sallust, an au­ thor o f whom more might have been made in The Machiavellian Mo­ ment— as the abode o f a libertas which released the energies, the virtus, o f a nobility and people which the rule o f the kings had repressed. This virtus had issued in imperium, meaning either the authority o f the magis­ trate or commander, or the empire o f the republic itself; there was a strong implication that libertas entailed both war and conquest. Empire had corrupted the people, and even if it had not done so, its very extent had compelled the transfer o f both libertas and imperium into the hands o f a single princeps. Here, we might say, was the original “Machiavellian moment” ; the free republic set itself problems it might not be able to solve. From the establishment of rule by a prince or emperor, thinking might proceed in either or both o f two directions. It might be said that libertas and virtus had been lost and that humans now lived as subjects of a system in which they could no longer shape themselves; or it might be said that they had been released into a universal peace, ecumene, or em­ pire in which they were free to choose between innumerable modes of action, protected for them by a supreme magistrate and by laws they did not need to have made for themselves. Libertas et imperium were replaced by an empire o f laws; freedom to act by freedom from the injustices imposed by others. Political thought, theory, or philosophy— pervaded as they have been at every point by jurisprudence— are, we might simplify the account by saying, the ideology o f liberal empire; what has come down to us from the republic is another matter. Historiography— meaning here the con­ struction o f grand historical narratives— has taken two distinguishable courses: the one recounting the transformation of republic into empire, the other maintaining that libertas and imperium are both inseparable and mutually destructive. In work I am doing while I write this afterword, on the history o f the topos o f Decline and Fall ,61 have been led to conclude that— though Cicero himself was a martyr to the republic in whose down­ fall he perished— the “ Ciceronian” ideal o f citizenship discovered by Skinner in the thirteenth century was by no means incompatible with the proposition that the civic virtues might be practiced under the rule o f law 6 Barbarism and Religion, vol. Ill: The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, forthcoming). 559

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and a just prince, so that Augustus, Trajan, or Justinian ruled over men free in the sense that there was law to which they could appeal. Hans Baron’s Florentines, on the other hand, two centuries later, were capable o f insisting that under the Caesars libertas disappeared, with the result that the princes became tyrants and monsters, and the citizens had no longer the virtus necessary to maintain the empire it had acquired against the barbarians.7 These two narratives— the former compatible far more than the latter with the jurisprudence and philosophy we take to have formed the “ his­ tory o f political thought” in early modern Europe— rest on two concepts o f liberty broadly resembling the “ negative” and “positive” poles of the distinction drawn by Berlin: the liberty which is protected and the liberty which is asserted. One may of course assert the liberty to do one’s own self-protection, and perhaps that is the key to the history o f democratic liberalism. In the history o f political and theoretical discourse, the rela­ tions between these polar concepts have been enormously complex,8 but to understand this history one must understand the radical differences between them. Ten years after The Machiavellian Moment, I published in book form an essay in which I affirmed that the notions o f “ right” and “virtue” could never be reduced to a common meaning.9 O f this Richard Tuck has recently warned that it is “unconvincing” and “ misleading” to draw “ a hard and fast line,” as he thinks I have done, “ between humanists and jurists.” 10 It would indeed be misleading in the highest degree to 7 On this point— the principate as decline— I draw a sharper distinction be­ tween quattrocento and trecento humanists than will be found, for example, at Skin­ ner, vol. I, The Renaissance, pp. 54-56. The decline of Roman liberty as the earlier writers see it is not incompatible with its rebirth as sacred empire, in Ghibelline writings, or under papal protection in Guelf. For Bruni there is a more decisive break with either; for Machiavelli it has become absolute. 8The bibliography of this debate, in recent political theory and historiography, is very extensive and will not be attempted here. See, however, Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 1997). 9“Virtues, Rights and Manners: A Model for Historians of Political Thought,” Political Theory, IX, no. 3 (1981), 353-68, reprinted in Virtue, Commerce and His­ tory, pp. 37-50. 10 Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the Interna­ tional Order from Grotius to Kant (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 14. The passage to which he draws attention (n.26) employs the term “ civic hu­ manism,” which, whatever its degree of precision, does not denote “humanism” in all its forms. Tuck proceeds to define “humanism” as best suits his thesis, that is, as the humanism of jurists. Donald R. Kelley’s The Human Measure: Social Thought in the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990) is a fine account of how this humanism— “civil” as opposed to “civic” — has shaped historical understanding.

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attempt a hard and fast separation between two such large and indeter­ minate groups o f practitioners whose memberships overlapped and who borrowed constantly from one another, but that was not what I was at­ tempting. T h e sharp distinction I aimed to draw was one between two conceptual premises: between a right to which one may lay claim (per­ haps because it is inherent in one’s nature) and a virtue which one must find in oneself and express in actions undertaken with one’s equals. O f these, it is true, the former is inherently part of the language o f jurispru­ dence, and o f the moral philosophy, philosophy of law, and occasionally philosophy o f history, to which jurisprudence has given rise, while the latter is more likely to be found in the narratives o f ancient civic action which humanists have studied and elaborated into narratives of the rise and fall o f Greek and Roman systems o f citizenship. Th is distinction is not “ hard and fast,” since the two modes o f understanding have con­ stantly overlapped and interacted; but it has to be insisted upon if we are to understand the tensions which have arisen in the course o f this inter­ action, o f which the tensions between “ ancient” and “ modern,” “ positive” and “negative,” concepts o f liberty have formed a large part. These broad distinctions may be associated with another— that be­ tween two branches o f the literature o f political thought: between politi­ cal philosophy, which in medieval and modern times has been closely allied with jurisprudence and has tended toward a vision o f human soci­ ety as a complex o f activities regulated by various systems o f natural and positive law; and historiography, which as a branch o f political thought has at times shown a concern with systems o f ancient virtue and their replacement in medieval and modern times by systems more like those which interest philosophers. I see my own work, in The Machiavellian Moment, in Virtue, Commerce and History ( 1985 ), and in the ongoing series Barbarism and Religion ( 1999 -), as being much concerned with the histo­ riography o f “ ancient” and “ modern” as a branch o f political thought. I see this historiography as containing— but by no means confined to— a concept o f liberty as rooted in the autonomy o f the person, where it encounters the historical problems that arise as the interactions between persons in society, economy, and culture grow more complex; and since I see “virtue” and “ right” not as incompatible but as irreduceable, I incline toward a Berlinesque vision in which these concepts o f liberty are un­ likely to arrive at any lasting reconciliation. This may be a philosophy of history; I see it rather as a governing formula useful in understanding what is going on in the formation of historical narrative in early modern Europe and America. I see Quentin Skinner’s employment o f “ Ciceronian” concepts of citi­ zenship, as against the ultimately “Machiavellian” concepts developed by

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Baron and myself, as tending toward the reconstruction o f the republic as a community of citizens regulated by law and justice, rather than one of citizens whose fiercely competitive (and expansive) virtue may or may not regulate itself by establishing a discipline o f equality (an equality of rule, it should be noted, rather than an equality o f rights). This tendency, if I am right in detecting it, would have the effect of moving Skinner’s his­ tory o f the republic as idea back into the context provided by the history o f jurisprudence and philosophy; while the quite different historical scheme being proposed by Richard Tuck— in which “ Ciceronian” concepts are opposed to “Tacitist” and Machiavelli himself is a “ Ciceronian” — is clearly aimed at abolishing the claim that the concept o f virtus has any history which cannot be enclosed within the history of natural law and its variants.11 I recognize the various histories recounted by Skinner and Tuck as histories which can be traced as having actually happened; none o f us subscribes to the view that all history is fiction; but I claim to be recounting another history, which can traced as interacting with those they recount and may even— as I shall argue later in this afterword— be continued to the point o f having a present tense. Meanwhile— and here I am no longer speaking o f the two scholars I have just mentioned— I notice in the historical profession generally, and among historians of po­ litical thought in particular, a low level of tolerance, even after thirty years, toward the notion that civic virtue as studied in The Machiavellian Moment enjoys a history of its own; there is a fairly constant desire to diminish or dismiss its presence.12 In some cases this arises from a prefer­ ence for Isaiah Berlin’s “ negative” over his “ positive” liberty, but far more often it is an instance o f the politics o f paradigm. T h e history o f political thought has so long, and for such good reasons, been written in terms o f the triadic sovereignty o f philosophy, theology, and jurispru­ dence that there is a deep reluctance to admit a fourth voice in the con­ versation. And there is an accompanying tendency— historians being of­ ten clumsy in handling the dialectical thinking in which they should be accomplished— to suppose that the unfamiliar diminishes the “ impor­ tance” o f the familiar and that the latter must be defended by diminish­ ing the “importance” o f the former. The Machiavellian Moment should be read as a history o f the dialectic between the republic and its alternatives.

11 Tuck’s works, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), Philosophy and Government, 15 7 2 -16 5 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), and The Rights of War and Peace, are re­ viewed by him in the introduction to the last-named. 12 See, most recently, James Hankins (ed.), Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reflec­ tions and Reappraisals (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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[n] “H ow the devil,” demanded the late Jack Hexter, reviewing The Machia­ vellian Moment not long after its first appearance, “ did republican thought, o f all things, get a footing in England, o f all places, in the first place?” 13 T h e question was well put, and characteristically expressed. It raised a number o f problems, not least the appearance o f an ideology formed in Italian city republics in the centralized territorial and agrarian mon­ archies which historians describe as “modern states” and “nation states.” We have trained ourselves to search European history for the first mo­ ments o f “ modernity,” and Quentin Skinner has located one as early as the middle o f the twelfth century, when Otto Freising described Italian city politics to his German feudal readers. There is a long-standing tradi­ tion o f calling Machiavelli the first “ modern” thinker about politics, on the double ground that his “ republicanism” breaks decisively with scho­ lastic papalism and imperialism, and that his “Machiavellism” provides the foundation o f raison d'etat in the age o f the sovereign monarchies. I am unable to accept these theses, and in a lecture delivered in the Pa­ lazzo della Signoria itself 141 argued that what we call “modern” political thinking does not appear until the territorial monarchies, o f which M achi­ avelli had little experience, began emerging from the wars o f religion, which he did not live to see.15 In this perspective the first “ modern” theo­ rists would be the exponents of jus gentium and raison d'etat, Hugo Grotius and Thom as Hobbes. I would set a wider gap than do the fol­ lowers of Leo Strauss between Hobbes and Machiavelli, interesting though the later theorist found the earlier, and I can make little sense of the thesis that Machiavelli was an exponent o f “ modern natural law,” since I see no evidence that the conceptual scheme o f natural law ever entered his text, or his head. As his texts escaped his control and were read by philosophers and jurists, they may well have been retranslated as chal­ lenging the thought o f the latter, but this is a point at which a sharp distinction between humanists and jurists may be of some use. 13J. H. Hexter, On Historians (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 288. His chapter reviewing The Machiavellian Moment— here pp. 255303— originally appeared in History and Theory, X V I (1977), 306-37. 14 On June 20, 1994, the occasion being the transfer to New York University of the villas formerly belonging to Sir Harold Acton. I spoke in the presence of Antonio di Pietro, then a leader of the magistrates investigating corruption in the Italian political class, and the Cardinal Archbishop of Florence, who told me I had spoken of Machiavelli in a way to give hope for the future of Italy. I believe that his Eminence and I both understood very well what we were saying. 15 The lecture was published as “Machiavelli and the Rethinking of History,” in 11 Pensiero Politico, X XV II, no. 2 (1994), 215-30 .

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I see Machiavelli, as he saw himself, as one concerned with the state­ ment of “ ancient” values under “ modern” conditions,16 and this is a key to the paradoxical appearance o f “ republican” thought at the heart o f an early modern monarchy. T h e values he propounded were “ ancient” in a radical sense. T h e ideology o f virtus can be traced back to the hoplite revolution of perhaps the seventh century before Christ; it expresses an ideal of warrior citizenship pre-Socratic, pre-Christian, and pre-juristic, and attempts to prove that “ ancient” values were philosophical and that Machiavelli was “ modern” in departing from them17 appear to me to miss the point. T h e language o f virtus is more Latin than Attic; it was kept alive by the great Roman orators and historians from Cicero to Tacitus, as they stressed its suppression by the values o f Caesarean empire, and the history o f republican and counter-republican thinking is bound up with the historiography o f Decline and Fall. T h e immediate point, how­ ever, is that the paradox o f the presence of values so radically ancient at the heart of early modernity is central to what is meant by “ the Machia­ vellian moment.” T h e post-Florentine chapters o f this book are con­ cerned with a quarrel between “ ancients” and “ moderns” in baroque and enlightened political thinking. Hexter expressed himself satisfied by my account o f how Tudor-Stuart English thinking left room for the development of ideas o f an active citizenship, but later critics— Patrick Collinson and Markku Peltonen18— have been less happy with my claim that a fall-grown republicanism is not to be found before the regicide o f 1649. M y meaning was that it was only then that the English polity was imagined in the form o f a republic. Much o f what Peltonen and others have found seems to me to belong with the category of Tacitism, a mode o f discourse common in the later sixteenth century and consisting in both the injunction to submit oneself to an imperfect monarchy and the means of articulating for oneself the 16 Pocock, “Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Ancients and Moderns,” Canadian Journal of Social and Political Theory, II, no. 3 (1978), 9 3-10 9 and “Machiavelli in the Liberal Cosmos,” Political Theory, XIII, no. 4 (1985), 559-74. 17 This I take to be a central argument of Paul A. Rahe’s Republics Ancient and Modem (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). See also Harvey C. Mansfield, MachiavelWs New Modes and Orders: A Study of the Discourses on Livy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979); MachiavelWs Virtue (University of Chi­ cago Press, 1996). I see Machiavelli as radically “ ancient,” and the studies of his religious thought I have found most illuminating are those of Sebastian De Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton University Press, 1989) and Anthony J. Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 18 Patrick Collinson, De Republica Anglorum: Or History with the Politics Put Back (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570-1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1995). 564

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ways in which it was imperfect.19 Based on Tacitus’s account o f principate replacing republic, it contained the image o f a past condition of liberty but amounted to little more than a republicanism o f the court, a means by which discontented courtiers, counsellors, and magnates might imag­ ine themselves as senators. There are few plans for replacing the mon­ archy by its councils, and these are by their nature transitory; David N orbrook has brought to light one such connection, whose members could, from at latest the outset of the First Civil War, imagine dispensing with the monarchy and employed the Roman poet Lucan to express them­ selves.20 M y contention has been that it took civil war, dissolution of the government, and actual regicide to compel the imagining of England as a republic21 and the search for a concept o f active citizenship on which such a republic could be based. T h e pages in The Machiavellian Moment which caught H exter’s attention were those aimed at a theory o f citizen­ ship rather than o f a republic, and at concepts o f property and arms which I contended must be part o f such a theory. Two years after The Machiavellian Moment appeared, I published an edition o f The Political Works of James Harrington , 22 on which I had been working while the earlier text was in preparation. Harrington is a central figure in the present volume and in the historical scheme that has taken shape in and around my writings; there are essays earlier than 1975 in which this scheme, and his and Machiavelli’s roles in it, are sketched out.23 As the reader knows, it is central to this book that Harrington restated

19There is an extensive literature on Tacitism, republican, monarchical, and philosophical. See Peter Burke, “Tacitism, Scepticism and Reason of State,” in J. H. Burns (ed., with the assistance of Mark Goldie), The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 14 50 -170 0 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 479-98. 20 David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660 (Cambridge University Press, 1999). 21 This contention may also apply to John Milton; see David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1995). 22J.G .A . Pocock (ed.), The Political Works ofJames Harrington (Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1977); see now also, James Harrington: Oceana and A System of Poli­ tics (Cambridge University Press, 1992). 23 “Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, XXII, no. 4 (1965), 54983, reprinted in J.G .A . Pocock, Politics, Language and Time (New York: Atheneum, 19 71; University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 104-47); “The Only Politi­ cian: Machiavelli, Harrington and Felix Raab,” Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, XII, no. 46 (1966), 265-96; “ Civic Humanism and Its Role in Anglo-American Thought,” in Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, pp. 80-103; “James Harrington and the Good Old Cause: A Study of the Ideological Context of his Writings,” Journal of British Studies, X, no. 1 (1970), 30-48.

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Machiavelli’s doctrine o f the armed and active citizen in the setting o f a history of land tenures as necessary to the exercise of arms, a history running from classical and republican antiquity through feudal tenure— termed “ modern prudence” — to a present when antique conditions might be restored. This scheme, its disappointments, and its transformations, are necessary to the history o f “ the Machiavellian moment,” but it has been the subject o f much controversy. Historical schemes o f changing property were far from unknown in 1975, but most of them culminated in property as commodity and society more or less capitalist and com­ mercial. T h e effect of the scheme I was proposing was to prolong the tensions between real and moveable property, land and commerce, far­ ther into modern times than was welcome to either liberal or Marxist thought in the 1970s. There were Italian critics who looked on The Machi­ avellian Moment as part o f a scheme to impose an ideology o f American liberalism on the course o f European history; in the replies I made to them I was able to point out that my book was already under attack for being neither liberal nor American enough.24 In anglophone Marxism there existed a tradition— running from R. H. Tawney through C. B. Macpherson and Christopher H ill— which exhibited Harrington as a bourgeois ideologist like everyone else o f his era25; to these I suggested that the description “ possessive individualists,” as Macpherson had devel­ oped it, fitted Harrington’s adversary Matthew W ren better than it did him.26 It was crucial to my thesis that we were moving into a period in which there were tensions between land and commerce and republican theory might find itself better based on the former than on the latter. It was never the case, however, that there had been a “Machiavellian mo­ 24 For these— especially in relation to the late Renzo Pecchioli’s Dal Mito di Venezia alVldeologia Americana (Venice: Marsilio, 1983)— see my “Mito di Venezia and Ideologia Americana'. A Correction,” II Pensiero Politico, XII, no. 3 (1980), 48386; “ The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History and Ideology,” Jour­ nal of Modem History, LIII, no. 1 (1981), 49-72; “Tra Gog e Magog: I Pericoli della Storiografia Repubblicana,” Rivista Storica ltaliana, XCV III, no. 1 (1986), 147-94; “Between Gog and Magog: The Republican Thesis and the Ideologia Americana? Journal of the History of Ideas, XLVIII, no. 2 (1987), 325-46, reprinted in Frank Shuffleton ved.), The American Enlightenment (University of Rochester Press, 1993, pp. 379-400). 25 R. H. Tawney, “Harrington’s Interpretation of His Age,” Proceedings of the British Academy, X X V II (1941), 199-233; C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1962), ch. 6; Christopher Hill, “James Harrington and the People,” in Puritanism and Revolution (London: Mercury Books, 1962), pp. 29 9 -313. On these works, see The Political Thought of James Harrington, pp. 56-57, and Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (reissued, Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 128-29, 139-44, 32 I_ 2 3* 26 The Political Thought ofJames Harrington, pp. 88-89.

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ment” at which the short-lived English republic had faced a choice be­ tween agrarian and commercial values, and I had not stated that there was.27 Harrington merely thought inheritable landed property a more se­ cure basis for a republican citizenry than moveable goods bought and sold on a market, and argued that a republic should expand its basis in land to keep pace with the growth of its commerce. H e was expounding Turner’s “ frontier thesis” before it had been formulated, and the debate between virtue and commerce, unknown to Machiavelli, had barely begun. M y reading o f Harrington has been most pertinaciously attacked where it rests on the assertion that he intended to base his ideal (but English) republic on the virtue o f the active citizen. H e wrote a good deal— per­ haps more than I attended to— about the concept o f interest and the means o f converting the interest of the individual into the interest o f the whole. There are points in his writings where he seems to present the institutions o f his republic as a series o f mechanisms for making men behave virtuously when they are not so by nature; and there is a de­ cidedly strange proposal for separating speech from action and confining the former to the few, who are to debate but not decide, and the latter to the many, who are to decide without debating. On these bases it has been argued by Jonathan Scott, on a number o f occasions, that Harrington was not a republican but an eccentric Hobbesian o f possibly unsound mind, and his utopia a kind o f dispersed and unpersonified Leviathan designed to coerce men into an obedience they would never give o f them­ selves.28 Scott is one o f a number of scholars who have valuably reminded us that there were many varieties of English republicanism— I hope I did not suggest that Harrington’s was the only kind, but it would not matter greatly if I did— the full range of which has been examined in a series o f chapters by Blair Worden.29 I reply to Scott’s reading of Harrington by 27 Cf. Steve Pincus, “Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individual­ ism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Republic,” American Historical Review, 103, no. 3 (1998), 705-36. 28Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 16 2 3 -16 77 (Cam­ bridge University Press, 1988); “The Rapture of Motion: James Harrington’s Re­ publicanism,” in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Political Dis­ course in Early Modem Britain (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 139 -63; “The Peace of Silence: Thucydides and the English Civil War,” in Miles Fairburn and W. H. Oliver (eds.), The Certainty of Doubt: Tributes to Peter Munz (Well­ ington: Victoria University Press, 1996), pp. 9 0 - 116 ; England's Troubles: Seven­ teenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 2000). See also J. C. Davis, “Pocock’s Harrington: Grace, Nature and Art in the Classical Republicanism of James Harrington,” Historical Journal, XXIV, no. 3 (1981), 683-97. 29 Blair Worden, ch. 15 of Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Political 567

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quoting a passage from the latter’s last work, which I think does not appear in The Machiavellian Moment but was known to me at the time of writing it. Th e contemplation of form is astonishing to man, and has a kind of trouble or impulse accompanying it, that exalts his soul to God. As the form o f a man is the image o f God, so the form o f a govern­ ment is the image o f man.30 This language is Platonic and could scarcely have been used by Hobbes (or perhaps by Machiavelli). It tells us that as men govern them­ selves, they become as gods; their government o f themselves is rooted in the earth, as G od ’s government is rooted in the creation. T h e institutions o f Oceana are not manipulative but consist in the form through which men become what they ought to be. We have advanced far beyond R o ­ man virtus to a Platonist theology o f citizenship, one which eliminates the priest by elevating the citizen to perform his role, and may— for reasons too complex to elaborate here— end by leaving the Son less than the equal o f his Father in the Christian Trinity. Hobbes may be seen arriving at the same point by a different route, and he and Harrington were at one in their attack upon orthodox Christian ecclesiology.31 T h e most valuable work on Harrington since 1977 has been done by M ark Goldie and Justin Champion, who have examined his extreme anticler­ icalism and his role as a pioneer o f the English “radical Enlightenment.” 32 T h e journey into political theology as a key to English thought in “ the long eighteenth century” is a development which I heartily endorse33 but which does not figure in The Machiavellian Moment. It remains to be seen how the two may be connected. T h e historical scheme into which Harrington inserted the concept o f Thought, 1450 -170 0; chs. 1 - 4 of David Wootton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649-1776 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 30Harrington, A System of Politics, IV, 3 ,4 ; Pocock, The Political Works of James Harrington, p. 837; Pocock , James Harrington, p. 273. 31 Pocock, The Political Works ofJames Harrington, pp. 78-82, 89-97; “ Contexts for the Study of James Harrington,” II Pensiero Politico, XI, no. 1 (1978), 20-35. 32 Mark Goldie, “The Civil Religion of James Harrington,” in Anthony Pagden (ed.), Languages of Political Theory in Early Modem Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1987) pp. 197-224; “Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism,” in Phillipson and Skinner, op. cit., pp. 20 9 -31; and Goldie (ed.), The Reception of Locke's Politics (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), vol. 1, introduction; J.A.I. Champion, The

Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660-1730 (Cambridge University Press, 1992). 33J.C .D . Clark, English Society, 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge University Press, 1985; 2d ed., 2000).

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citizenship was one o f unusual sophistication for its time, but was still what we should call pre-modern. It took the form of a loop, returning to its starting-point, the renewal o f the conditions under which the ancient republics had been possible; and the reason for this was Harrington’s belief that armies must still be settled on the land and that the attempt to pay them in cash on a regular basis was beyond the capacities o f the state— the problem which had brought down the Roman republic and the principate which had succeeded it. W ithin half a century of Har­ rington’s writing, however, the emergence o f the standing army, based on a system o f public credit, had brought about what intellectuals by the year 1700 recognized, as I narrate in chapter X II above, as a transforma­ tion o f historical conditions. M y subsequent work, down to the moment at which I am writing, has been concerned with the perceived conse­ quences o f this transformation and how it gave birth to what may be termed Enlightenment, in more than one o f the many senses in which that word can be used. I have elsewhere described34 how in 1976, the year after this book’s first publication, I was led to begin a project o f studying Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in which a vision o f European history based on the rise and spread of commercial society entailed a history o f the collapse of ancient Mediterranean empire but was still exposed to the challenge of ancient values. In this and at many other points I was led to expand “ the Machiavellian moment” into one at which the ideals and discourses o f “virtue” and “ commerce” challenged one another, and I found myself asserting that this moment was so far prolonged that there were ways of saying that it might be still going on. These assertions began to take shape in the four last chapters o f The Machiavellian Moment and have been elaborated in subsequent publica­ tions, in particular Virtue, Commerce and History (1985) and Barbarism and Religion (19 9 9 -).35 T h e trajectory o f these works, and their reception, has 34Barbarism and Religion, vol. I, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon (Cam­ bridge University Press, 1999), pp. 1-2 . 35 Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1985); “ Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment,” in R. Ajello et al. (eds.), LEtd dei Lumi: Studi Storici nel Settecento Europeo in Onore di Franco Venturi (Naples: Jovene, 1985), vol. 1, pp. 523-622; “The Political Limits to Pre-Modem Economics,” in John Dunn (ed.), The Economic Limits to Modem Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1990); “The Significance of 1688: Some Reflections on Whig History,” in Robert Beddard (ed.), The Revolutions of 1688: The Andrew Browning Lectures, 1988 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 271-9 2; “ Standing Armies and Public Credit: The Institutions of Leviathan,” in Dale Hoak and Mordechai Feingold (eds.), The

World of William and Mary: Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688-89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 87-103; Barbarism and Religion, vol. I, ch. 4 (“The Hampshire Militia and the Problems of Modernity”). 569

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been affected by their involvement in a series o f debates over “positive” and “negative” liberty, “republicanism,” and “liberalism” — debates which they have, sometimes inadvertently, helped to shape (if “ shape” is a word appropriate to the present condition o f these arguments).36 It may lessen confusion, though it may increase complexity, to say something here about the intentions o f The Machiavellian Moment and how they may be misunderstood and should be understood. T h e revolutionary effects o f the introduction o f public credit and the standing army included the rec­ ognition as a new and dominant force in politics and history o f what was termed “ commercial society” and later “ civil society” — that state o f af­ fairs, made possible very largely by trade, capital, and mobile property, in which exchange relations among human beings generated a wealth and civility proof against religious and civil warfare. (The need to emerge from the Wars o f Religion, including their distinctive English variant, can be seen as cardinal to the growth o f Enlightenment.)37 In studying and encouraging the phenomena o f “ commercial” and “ civil society,” a crucial role came to be attached to what were variously known as “ man­ ners” and “ politeness” : the social usages, and the accepted images of both self and other, that arose as human beings encountered one another in an increasingly complex process of exchange and engaged in the benign fric­ tion which came to be denoted as “ polishing” and issued in “ politeness.” 38 A polite society was also a commercial society, and the culture o f early dominant capitalism came to depict politics as a process o f the “ polish­ ing,” “ moderating, “ refinement,” and (a more dangerous term) “ soften­ ing” o f human passions and interests through their conversion into “ manners.” 39 If we are to consider Enlightenment as a process o f the increasing disempowerment of religious belief, we must further notice that “ polite” men and women would be averse to fanaticism, since they believed that they knew only what they knew o f one another and that such knowledge could consist only o f “ opinion,” a term which obliged toleration by forbidding conviction— a crucial step in the formation of what we call “ liberalism,” though the word has not yet been used in this afterword and we should not be hasty in introducing it. T h e polite society, it must be noted, was one organized with increas­ ing efficiency for war. “ Commerce” generated “ public credit,” and “ pub36 See note 8, above. 37 For a farther statement of this case, see Barbarism and Religion, I, pp. 56-58, 10 8 -12 . 38 Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Eighteenth Century England (Cambridge University Press, I 994)-

39 Classically stated by Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton University Press, 1976).

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lie credit” the “ standing army.” T h e latter was not simply an instrument through which the state pursued its purposes, but one through which it prevented that pursuit from destroying it; once the army was an arm o f the state, there was decreased danger o f civil war (a key to the mystery o f 1688 in English history). W ar was increasingly under the state’s control, and there was a short-lived utopia in which Europe appeared a “ confed­ eration” or “ republic” o f states, in whose interactions the element o f war was moderated and civilized by the combined forces o f jus gentium and a shared culture o f manners disseminated by commerce. (I do not deny the importance o f international law in choosing to pursue the theme o f man­ ners.) Th is utopia was beginning to disintegrate by 176 3, as the great wars between France and Britain for predominance in Europe, America, and India led each to expand its “ public credit” to the point where “na­ tional debt” threatened revolutionary consequences; and in the philo­ sophical history I am constructing I attach ideal significance to David Hum e’s dictum that “ the nation must destroy public credit, or public credit must destroy the nation.”40 Hume had been concerned in all his writings with the superiority o f a modern society based on commerce over an ancient society based on naked individuality, but he had reached the point o f imagining a society so far in debt to faceless creditors that the value o f all property, the liberty o f every individual, and the mean­ ing o f every thing or idea, would be reduced to its capacity to persuade creditors to continue an economy based exclusively on speculation. T h e natural relations between humans in society— and this would include manners— would thus be ended and disappear for lack o f ontological or epistemological foundations. Edmund Burke came to see the growth of public debt as conducive to revolutionary fantasy, and revolution as a program for the subversion o f all manners.41 It is with this in view that I present as crucial the argument put for­ ward as early as 1698 by Andrew Fletcher.42 A warm advocate o f the spread of trade— he was among the promoters o f the scheme for a Scot­ tish entrepot at Darien— he doubted whether, with the growth o f com­ merce and consumption, something essential to human freedom was not being given up: namely, the exercise o f arms and the possession o f the property on which arms were settled, essential to the individual’s capacity to appear personally in his own government. In reply to such doubts, we have seen how Daniel Defoe argued that it was enough for the individual to be represented in a parliament that would check the abuse o f power by 40Above, p. 497. 41 See farther Virtue, Commerce and History , ch. 10, “The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution.” 42 See now John Robertson (ed.), Andrew Fletcher: Political Works (Cambridge University Press, 1997). 571

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the state that now controlled the army, and that a society founded on the individual’s possession of arms was likely to be warlike, impoverished, and separated into masters and serfs. It is the debate between direct and representative democracy, and close to that between positive and nega­ tive liberty; and it is at the same time a debate between two imperfectly satisfactory moments in history, such as will from this point be the mean­ ing o f “ the Machiavellian moment.” T h e individual who possesses the means o f his own freedom is liable to regress into barbarism, unsup­ ported by the freedom o f others; the individual whose freedom consists in the exercise o f diverse capacities, but who never brings them together in the performance o f public acts in his own person, is liable to progress into corruption and find himself subject to tyranny. There is no ideal moment in history, and though we may imagine a species o f freedom which consists in the freedom to move prudently between the ancient and the modern poles, the exercise o f such freedom depends upon the maintenance of the unity of personality necessary to act in history, and history has become a process o f rendering that unity precarious. There is consequently a species o f historicism, in which many or most thinkers of the eighteenth century can be seen to have been involved. I am suggesting a debate between ancient and modern liberty, the for­ mer supposing the direct action o f the personality, the latter its media­ tion through all the multifarious activities which may relate humans to one another in society— the liberty o f the hedgehog, who knows himself but may know nothing else, opposed to the liberty of the fox, who knows so many things that he may have no self left to know.43 It is akin to the debate between “positive” liberty, in which the assertion o f the self can be made to look antique and barbaric, and “ negative” liberty, in which freedom from restraint may fail to answer the question who it is who is being restrained or liberated. It is, however, sharply distinct— in the sense that it requires and provides a very different narrative— from that history o f “ negative liberty” which is told entirely in terms of the law, natural, constitutional, or positive, which furnishes the individual with rights and defines his freedom as their exercise. Liberty defined as jus, right, droit, or recht, has of course an imposing history in the eighteenth century, and in choosing to relate another history I do not mean to deny the importance of this one, though I may suspect that the history I nar­ rate raised questions not answered or asked in that I do not. T h e essay quoted above, in which I asserted— and must now maintain as against Richard Tuck— that the concepts of “virtue” and “ right” could not be reduced to one another, in fact made that claim with regard to a triad, of 43 Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox first appeared in book form as part of Russian Thinkers (London: Hogarth, 1978). 572

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“virtues,” “ rights,” and “ manners.” I will now make the claim that my work from The Machiavellian Moment through Virtue, Commerce and His­ tory and several linking essays to the opening volumes o f Barbarism and Religion^ has been concerned with a dialectic between “virtues” and “ manners,” initially and thereafter distinct from that between “virtues” and “rights” with which the historians of “negative” versus “ positive” liberty have been preoccupied. I do not mean that the latter debate did not exist, was not important, or should be subordinated to that between “virtues” and “ manners,” only that the narrative I have tried to set forth needs to be related in its own terms if we are to understand what was going on in the eighteenth century. It may be that the narrative o f posi­ tive and negative liberty needs to make a detour through that o f ancient and modern liberty if the richness o f the story is to be understood, and I note that Quentin Skinner has not traveled much in the eighteenth cen­ tury, but I am navigating by a rather different compass-card. Since I am preoccupied as a historian with the dialogue between an­ cient and modern liberty, it is unsurprising that the recent political phi­ losopher whose work has the greatest resonance for me should be the late Hannah Arendt. I have certainly been narrating the history o f a phe­ nomenon she noted, whereby in the eighteenth century the social rose up against the political, and the image o f human action was replaced by that o f human behavior.45 This formula is deeply illuminating, but it does not follow— as Harvey Mansfield, a Straussian for whom history is sub­ servient to philosophy, has wrongly supposed46— that I have selected Arendt’s as a philosophy whose work I may convert into history; the life of the mind is neither as simple nor as muddled as that. I am a historian concerned mainly with happenings in anglophone history, and I note that the tensions between ancient and modern liberty, brought into the open by Fletcher and Defoe in 1698, were elaborated under that rubric by defenders o f Sir Robert Walpole about 1734, some eighty years before Benjamin Constant employed them to understand Jacobin and N apo­ leonic history.47 T h e late Judith Shklar once inquired with characteristic vehemence why I had spent time on anything so provincial as British and American history instead o f joining that mainstream which flowed to­ ward the Niagara o f the French Revolution. I can reply only that I study a history which did not shoot Niagara and avoided it as a maelstrom; an Anglo-French history as European as it is American. 44 See note 35, above. 45 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1958), ch. 6, “The Rise of the Social.” 46 See Hankins, Florentine Civic Humanism, pp. 226-27. 47 Biancamaria Fontana (ed.), Benjamin Constant: Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1988). 573

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[III] Jack Hexter’s question might now be rephrased, and it might be answered that in W hig parliamentary England (of all places), republican thought (of all things) had a specific but not an immediate effect. It did not pro­ duce any programs for replacing monarchy with a republic. T h e memory o f the kingless regime— even when that of a Protector and a parlia­ ment— following the regicide o f 1649 was a memory o f civil war that nobody desired to repeat; and the conviction that human monarchy was a necessary reflection o f the monarchy of God was very deeply rooted in­ deed. T h e theological convictions o f what philosophical republicans there were could be ascertained only with difficulty; John Toland, if one o f them, seemed not only a deist but a pantheist.48 Catharine Macaulay, the most formidably learned republican historian in W hig England, looked back to no Harringtonian formula but to the brief rule o f the Rump Parliament, when a group of philosophic statesmen— Vane, Sidney, and (in Wordsworth’s later phrase) “ others who called Milton friend” — might have legislated the English people into fitness for a republic.49 This theme was taken up by later historians— W illiam Godwin and Samuel Taylor Coleridge— in whose writings we see how easily the Platonic unitarianism attributed to these seventeenth-century figures could be rephrased as a nineteenth-century philosophical idealism. This line o f thought no­ where led toward practice. T h e central problem of 1688 in retrospect— whether there had occurred a Lockean dissolution of government and reversion of power to the people— had little relationship to a republic of citizens and their virtue; the “ people” were exercising their rights and were free to return to monarchy if they saw fit. There is no “ Lockean moment” in English or British history, and the undoubted presence o f one in the process by which an American “ people” was led to set up a republic and make it federal is, as we shall see, open to dispute and determination. “ Republican” language in its English setting had more to do with the place o f personal monarchy in a balanced constitution. Since 1642, when Charles I ’s Answer to the Nineteen Propositions of Parliament had introduced this theory and made it controversial,50 it had been clear that a “ republic” 48Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Re­ publicans (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981). 49 Pocock, “ Catharine Macaulay: Patriot Republican,” in Hilda L. Smith (ed.),

Women Writers and the Early Modem British Political Tradition (Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1998), pp. 243-58. 50 Michael J. Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, Estates, and the Answer to the X IX Propositions (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press,

1985). 574

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might include a component o f active monarchy, not necessarily compati­ ble with the thesis that the king had no being outside unity with his parliament. “ Republicans” might be accused of reducing him to the merely symbolic status o f a Venetian doge; but Bolingbroke, claiming to reactivate the Crown against the “Venetian oligarchy” o f parliament, imagined the king as a “ patriot” at the head o f a “ patriot” people. This word carried strong connotations o f republican active citizenship, and Bolingbroke’s use o f it had to contend with a perception, as old as the Civil Wars, o f the “ patriot” as one who loved his country more than he loved its government, or even its king. H e might easily appear a Brutus, a Cato, or a Catiline, and it was not until the 1790s that “ patriot” acquired the primary meaning o f “ loyalist” (and was denounced by post-W hig intellectuals as meaning “ chauvinist”). M ore immediately, it connoted one in opposition, appealing to Roman virtue against ministerial corrup­ tion. Dr. Johnson’s well-grounded suspicion o f the motives o f such oppo­ sitions led him to his famous remark that “patriotism” was “ the last ref­ uge o f a scoundrel.” “ Patriot” and “ republican” discourse was to a large extent caught up in a parliamentarism which it might criticize but to which it could not pro­ pose alternatives; this is why it found itself confined to a role in opposi­ tion. T h e parliamentarism in question was that which Harrington had failed to foresee: based on the survival o f patronage and influence in crown and aristocracy after the decay o f feudal tenures, and their vast expansion in the world o f commerce and credit, national debts, and stand­ ing armies. It was this which Tories of Anne’s reign denounced as “ the monied interest,” the rule o f England by a new oligarchy based on a new kind o f property: the possession not of land, or even movable goods and merchant capital, but o f paper tokens o f confidence in the future o f a state now ruled by its creditors. Hum e’s analysis of “public credit” re­ minds us that even the great Scottish philosophers o f history, tracing the evolution o f commerce, liberty, and politeness, were not sure they had solved the problem o f national debt. Edmund Burke saw the French Rev­ olution as a lethal combination o f “monied interest” and atheist intellec­ tuals for the destruction of manners and their complex history; but he had to assert that the British national debt was secured, unlike the French, on the basis o f a national economy— and this had to be maintained in practice against the Humean forebodings o f Richard Price and Thomas Paine.51 Yet Paine was no classical republican, only a hater o f monarchy; he believed that a national debt would stimulate the economy once it was under democratic control. 51 Pocock (ed.), Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indi­ anapolis: Hackett Publishers, 1987). 575

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Once we see “ republican” thinking as an advocacy o f “ ancient liberty,” whose survival must be ensured under “ modern” conditions, we can see it as a philosophy of history engaged in a dialectic, a criticism o f history contained within the history it criticised. Its consequences, however, were not merely philosophical but were also practical; it provided the means o f showing any existing regime as “ corrupt,” entangled in condi­ tions that deprived personality o f the independence and autonomy indi­ cated by the term “virtue” ; and the Scottish philosophy o f history did not absolutely answer this challenge. It is a serious question in eighteenthcentury philosophy whether the human personality can survive in his­ tory; and the consequence in rhetoric and practice is that the existing order can always be shown as corrupt. This was to be important when the American revolution broke away from the W hig and parliamentary order and set about the foundation o f a republic.52 T h e last chapter o f The Machiavellian Moment has been more involved in controversy than all its predecessors together, for the reason that it inquires into the historical character o f the American founding. There are earlier writings in which I indicate that my narrative can be carried from Florence to Philadelphia,53 but I can recollect realizing that this fifteenth chapter could be added, and to that extent I do not think that I wrote the book with the intent to arrive at this conclusion. N or was I at all alone in seeing the Revolution and Constitution as rooted in “ republi­ can” prehistory. Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution had already pointed out the extraordinary power o f English opposition ideology; Douglass Adair’s Fame and the Founding Fathers had shown how the leaders in 1776 and 1787 saw themselves as legislators in the Greco-Rom an sense54; and Gordon W ood’s The Creation of the Ameri­ can Republic had dealt with American classics republicanism and the ex­

521 have carried the history of Anglo-American political discourse as far as its separation by the American Revolution and transformation by the French, in “The Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform: A History of Ideology and Discourse,” chapter 1 1 of Virtue, Commerce and History (1985); “A Discourse of Sovereignty: Observations on the Work in Progress,” in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modem Britain (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 377-428; and “Political Thought in the EnglishSpeaking Atlantic: (i) The Imperial Crisis,” “ (ii) Empire, Revolution and an End of Early Modernity,” chs. 8 and 9 of Pocock (ed., with the assistance of Gordon J. Schochet and Lois G. Schwoerer), The Varieties of British Political Thought (Cam­ bridge University Press, 1994). 53 See note 23, above. 54 Douglass Adair, Fame and the Founding Fathers, ed. Trevor Colbourn (New York: Norton, 1974). Like Gerald Stourzh in Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971), Adair brought to light the tensions created by the Humean critique of the republican idea. 576

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tent o f its supersession so effectively that he became one o f the principal authors arguing against me. It therefore did not seem outrageous to de­ pict the Revolution and Foundation as rooted in a long republican tradi­ tion or as entailing that dialogue between ancient and modern liberty which had become a principal meaning o f “ the Machiavellian moment” ; and I was, and remain, surprised by the vigor (at times the venom) with which I was, and still am, attacked for taking positions I did not remem­ ber taking and felt no need to endorse. I cannot avoid thinking that much of this criticism has been blinkered, the result of misunderstanding not simple but inherent in the ways too many historians think. I was not at any point saying that Americans— as they then began to know themselves— were actuated simply by “ classical republicanism” or “ country ideology.” These were present; they were highly articulated, and at times closed, belief systems, capable o f providing detailed exposi­ tions of events and values. To convey their presence I was at times obliged to articulate them in full and as if self-contained. But it was inherent in the whole concept o f a “Machiavellian moment” that such a discourse had encountered its opposites— including that o f a “modern liberty” — and had entered into dialectic with them, in which each borrowed from the other and arrived at awareness of the historicity o f both. Americans, I meant to say, were concerned with the question of retaining values under changing historical conditions; and I do not feel responsible for those who supposed I was saying that they were actuated exclusively by the values they were anxious to conserve. T h e Founders were a historically sophisticated generation, whatever may be said o f the culture they helped bring into being. I f I am right in holding that my positions have been unjustly sim­ plified, it is a question o f how this simplification has come about. Part of the answer seems to lie in a special veneration American historians have come to feel for the figure o f John Locke, a philosopher for whom ven­ eration should surely take the form o f clear thinking. In writing The Machiavellian Moment I was concerned— as I would not be now— with the argument o f Louis Hartz that Americans all thought like Locke be­ cause, in the absence o f a feudal past, there was no other way o f thinking open to them. In earlier work on the way the English thought about their feudal past, I had noticed important debates in which Locke took no part, closely connected with those in which he did55; and in studying the eighteenth-century debate about virtue and commerce, I had not 55 The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law developed the thesis that the re­ publication of Sir Robert Filmer’s works provoked historical as well as philosoph­ ical controversy, and that Locke was untypical in taking no part in the former. See Virtue, Commerce and History, pp. 220-30. 577

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found him to be one o f its principal movers. I therefore proposed, as a research strategy, that we should empty our minds o f Locke and his “ im­ portance” and wait for him to force his way back— as I was sure he would— in those roles in which he had been important. So far as his place in the debate over the American Revolution is concerned, I have since been concerned with his major part in promoting that liberal quasiChristianity whose appeal to Americans was noted at the time,56 with the ways in which his account o f how a people might declare its government dissolved was employed to the rather different end o f dissolving its ties with another people,57 and with a splendidly maverick contemporary ac­ count o f the Revolution which dismissed it as exclusively the result o f Locke’s disastrous philosophy .581 do not think that The Machiavellian Mo­ ment has led me to minimize his role, or that it was intended to do so; but there persists to this day a habit o f writing as if Locke were in need o f vindication against me.591 have been trying to define his role; to define is to delimit, but not to reduce. T h e difficulty here may be partly methodological. Historians often fail to practice the dialectical thinking they should study; they treat every thesis as if it were meant to explain a whole field, oppose it to another for which the same claim is made, and connect the two by such negative linkages as not-but, more-than, and from-to. This may help explain the curious habit o f meeting any statement that Locke did not do something with the assertion that he did do something else; but it should be our aim to relate the part played by his writings, or his pattern o f beliefs, to that played by other writings and other beliefs, and so to treat the American Founding as a conversation with itself about opposed values— as by gen­ eral agreement it was. Th at conversation may well have been one in which Locke played an important part, but need not have been a conver­ sation about Locke in which one took a stand for or against him, expres­ sing views like or unlike those to be found in his writings. Here we have 56Barbarism and Religion, I, pp. 68-70. See B. W. Young, Religion and Enlighten­ ment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Ox­ ford: The Clarendon Press, 1998). 57 Varieties of British Political Thought, pp. 281-82. 58 “Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke and Price: A Study in the Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Conservatism,” Virtue, Commerce and History, ch. 9. 59 See, most recently, T. H. Breen, The Lockean Moment: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2001). It is almost exclusively American historians who have rallied to the defense of Locke’s role in eighteenth-century British discourse; for instance, Isaac Kramnick, Repub­

licanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century En­ gland and America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Ronald Hamowy, “ Cato’s Letters, John Locke and the Republican Paradigm,” History of Political Thought, X I (1990), 273-94. 578

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the possibility o f another explanation, ideological rather than methodo­ logical, o f the defensiveness and protectiveness which some American historians display towards him. There has grown up a practice o f treating the debate in which The Machiavellian Moment has been involved as one between “ republican” and “ liberal” readings o f the American Constitu­ tion and the culture based upon it,60 and Locke has become a patron saint and founding father o f the American civil religion known as “ liberalism.” It is thought necessary to affirm that it is enough for the “liberal” citizen to know his rights and to be active in asserting them, whereas “ republi­ can” theory requires him to affirm a “virtue,” a combination o f autonomy and commitment, to which the concept o f a rights-bearer is not alto­ gether adequate. Here we begin to draw near, once more, to the tensions between “ positive” and “ negative” liberty prominent early in this essay. W hen I presented revolutionary thinking as based on the fear that “ cor­ ruption” might promote the loss o f “virtue” (and therefore liberty), I was held to be negating the extent to which it was based on an enumeration o f rights; and this appears to be what the “ Lockean moment” is all about. I emphasized the “republican” component because I thought it had a history that should be brought to light; but it is essential to the concept o f a “Machiavellian moment” that diverse principles should form part of the same action, and perhaps that they should be incapable o f a final resolution. The Machiavellian Moment, however, contains very few references to “ liberalism” — as a glance at the index will confirm— and I should be at ease if it contained none at all. T h e term was not used in the eighteenth century, where the adjective “ liberal” did not bear its modern meaning, and though elements were present which would in due course be assem­ bled by means o f this formula, there was no system o f doctrine corre­ sponding to its later use. T h e book is concerned with the rather different subject o f the tensions between ancient and modern liberty: between the kind o f liberty enjoyed by the inhabitant o f a complex commercial soci­ ety, and the criticisms both o f this concept o f liberty and o f the history which has given rise to it. I ask whether such tensions were apparent in the American Revolution and Founding, and I reply that there were. T he partly Lockean program that led to independence— that o f declaring col­ onies states and the empire a confederation, and then dissolving the con­ federation on grounds o f misgovernance— did not o f itself entail the cre­ ation o f republics. There was no blueprint for a Lockean republic, and Locke— who was interested in the origin and end o f government but not in its structure and exercise— had carefully abstained from instructing 601 shall not attempt a bibliography of this debate, since I have not sought to take part in it. 579

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the people as to how they might reconstitute the state after dissolving it. A Lockean polity would be a community of rights-bearers, but that said nothing as to its form, or— beyond the premise that it would be constitu­ tional— its constitution. We must therefore look beyond Locke to dis­ cover why it was taken for granted that the newly independent states would be republics, or what that word was understood to mean. Here Douglass Adair reminds us that the Founders came to see themselves as legislators in the classical sense, founders of classical republics to whom the rhetoric o f citizenship and virtue was highly relevant. Bernard Bailyn reminds us that the rhetoric of revolution was based on a deep-seated fear of ministerial corruption, to which the independence, liberty, and virtue of citizens provided the only, but deeply threatened, answer. And J . R. Pole had already informed us that the spread of representative as­ semblies had been accompanied by a spreading awareness o f how easily both representatives and electorates might be corrupted by patronage, including that o f the state.61 T h e rhetoric of corruption was so wide­ spread that it helps explain the creation o f republics as the means o f meeting it; but it is the essence of “ the Machiavellian moment” that the republic is itself exposed to the threat o f corruption. T h e discourse o f virtue and corruption therefore formed part o f the language o f both Revolution and Constitution; the question to be asked is what its presence meant. Here it is again regrettable that the debate involving The Machiavellian Moment has been an argument as to whether the foundation o f the republic rested on “ republican” principles or on some set o f other principles— Lockean, “ liberal,” or “ modern.” I did not wish to determine this question in either-or terms but to say that the foundation entailed a debate and tension between what I call “ ancient” and “ modern” ideas o f liberty, and that perhaps this debate was not fi­ nally resolved. Here o f course I was trespassing on American foundationalism: the republic was founded, foundation did involve the legisla­ tion o f principles, and to represent it as an unresolved “Machiavellian moment” was a challenging act. Gordon W ood’s Creation of the American Republic had in fact replied to my challenge before it was issued. H e did so by representing “ classical” republicanism as unequivocally “ ancient,” and American republicanism as a rapidly progressive victory o f the “ mod­ ern.” To this end he made more than I would have o f the aristocratic character o f “ ancient” republicanism; he left it little more than the rear­ guard action o f an American gentry. But his argument is sound to the extent that the classical republic, as an ideal, entailed an equality between an aristocracy and a democracy, and that an emerging American social 61 J. R. Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (London and New York: Macmillan, 1966).

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structure soon entailed a “ democracy” and an “ equality” incompatible with the notion that a natural aristocracy could so much as exist, and calling for a new ideology it was tempting to label “ liberalism.” “ Republic” at this point gave way to “ democracy.” T h e author who here got into deepest trouble was John Adams; his Defence of the Constitu­ tion of the United States— “ the most misunderstood book since the Bible”62— declared that an aristocracy o f powerful families would always emerge and must be guarded against, and was roundly condemned for even sug­ gesting the possibility. It is amusing to wonder what Adams might have said about the Kennedys, the Bushes, the Gores, and the Rockefellers, but if he thought the power o f families rested on their kinsmen, clients, and retainers, his thinking was insufficiently modern. In his own day, however, the threat o f aristocracy was perceived as modern, when Alex­ ander Hamilton was understood to be promoting a powerful executive, possessed o f a national debt, a standing army, and extensive political pa­ tronage. Here was that government by a “monied interest” for which in England the Country had been attacking the Court for a hundred years, and Hamilton was condemned as seeking to introduce a “ British” system o f rule.63 It was a debate with a long history, in which Locke had played no conspicuous part, but from which the notions o f “ credit” and “ prop­ erty,” “virtue” and “ corruption,” were certainly not absent. T h e extensive literature which informed me— as if I had suggested otherwise— that a republic o f Jeffersonian farmers would engage in trade both domestic and foreign seemed to me to miss the point. T h e issue had always been credit rather than commerce, the rentier and stock-trader who invested in the state rather than the entrepreneur who invested in production and exchange; and if Hamilton himself had been defeated, the system o f gov­ ernment he advocated might be thought to have survived, perpetuating tensions within American democracy whose history went a long way back. I was beginning to see the republic as a remedy for eighteenthcentury problems, whose very success had served to perpetuate them. T h e contention— perhaps not too great a simplification o f W ood’s ar­ gument— that the progress o f the American founding was from “ repub­ lic” to “ democracy” encounters, and is entangled in, the most extraordi­ nary verbal formulation to which it gave rise: James Madison’s dictum 62 Pocock, “ ‘The Book Most Misunderstood since the Bible’: John Adams and the Confusion about Aristocracy,” in Anna Maria Martellone and Elizabetta Vezzosi (eds.), Fra Toscana e Stati Uniti: II Discorso Politico nelVeta della Constituzione Americana (Florence: Olschki, 1989), pp. 18 1- 2 0 1. I was moved to remark that though I did not aspire to place myself in such exalted company, I knew how Adams had felt. 63 Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

1978). 581

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that a society in which the citizens rule themselves directly is a democ­ racy, while one in which they do so through their elected representatives is a republic. This is a deliberate reversal of the accepted meanings o f both words, and a reversal o f the accepted sense in which one is pre­ sumed “ ancient” and the other “ modern.” It is an ultra-conservative American position to declare that the Union is not a democracy but a republic. Madison wrote in pursuit o f the project of federalism, the con­ version of a confederacy of states into a federal republic capable of em­ pire without being corrupted by it— the enterprise which more than any other rendered the thought o f the Founding unique. It could not be pursued without conceiving a complex o f ways in which citizens might elect authorities who represented them, and it became a commonplace that representation, unknown to the ancients (but not to Roman law­ yers), was the great discovery o f modern politics. This very language, however, continued the dispute between ancient and modern, and pre­ vented Madison from abolishing it. W hether he knew it or not, Rousseau had already asked whether there was any sense in which one moral being could represent another, and whether one did not consent to one’s own corruption in choosing another whose actions should be considered as one’s own. Representation was in fact a fiction, and the creation o f an entirely Active, and fictitious, system o f government might prove incom­ patible with the notion that one acted as a citizen or a being naturally political. It was seen as o f the essence o f modernity that one inhabited a world of fictions in which self and other were creations o f the partial encounters between humans in a world o f exchanges. It may very well be that we have ourselves reached a condition where the knowledge o f fictiveness is unsatisfying to the point o f being intolerable; in doubting whether the oligarchy o f politicians who oblige us to choose between them represent us in any way worth speaking of, we doubt whether we have selves left to be represented. T h e global economy finds an ally in that postmodernism which informs us that self and society are alike ficti­ tious and that our only choice is which fiction to buy next. T h e dialogue between ancient and modern liberty has traveled a long way since commercial society was invented in England in the 1690s .641 have been pursuing its history at some distance from either the American debate between liberalism, republicanism, and/or communitarianism, or 64 Those works I have found most suggestive regarding its course and present condition are: Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (eds.), Machia­ velli and Republicanism (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism; Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Ox­ ford: The Clarendon Press, 1997); and Maurizio Viroli, Republicanism (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999). None of these, it will be plain, says exactly what I have been trying to say in these pages.

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the British pursuit o f the distinction between negative and positive lib­ erty, since while it could be linked with either, it seems to me not quite identical with them. N o r should the reader suppose that The Machia­ vellian Moment was written, or should be read, with the aim of arriving at this philosophical predicament. It illuminates certain things which were going on in the history it narrates, and it touches on many things which wore a different face and could be explained differently. H istory is a field o f study in which many explanations can, and must, exist together. For this reason, if there seems to be a historical story which leads from the apparently real to the increasingly fictitious, we can return to its study and find there the many ways in which we have been making ourselves and are not yet reduced to the choice between being our own solitary fictioneers and being the passive material o f those always anxious to do our inventing for us. Santa Monica, California; Baltimore, Maryland M arch -M ay 2002

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the Cardinall Gasper Contareno and Translated out of Italian into English by Lewes Lewkenor (London, 1599). Crevecoeur, Hector St. John. Letters from an American Farmer (Lon­ don: J. M. Dent and Son, 1912, 1962). Davenant, Charles. The Political and Commercial Works of Dr. Charles D'Avenant. Edited by Sir Charles Whitworth (London, 6 vols., 1 771 ) . Defoe, Daniel. An Argument showing that a Standing Army , with Consent of Parliament, Is not Inconsistent with a Free Government (London, 1698). --------- . The True-Born Englishman. A Satyr (London, 1700). --------- . The Review, Facsimile Text Society (N ew York: Columbia University Press, 23 vols., 1928).

Egmont, John Perceval, Earl of. Faction Detected by the Evidence of Facts (London, 1743). Ferguson, Adam. Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh University Press, 1966). Filmer, Sir Robert. Patriarcha and Other Political Writings, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949).

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Mario Domandi (N ew York: Harper and Row, 1965). --------- . Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Cecil and Margaret Grayson (London: Oxford University Press, 1965). --------- . The History of Italy, ed. and trans. Sidney Alexander (New York: Collier, 1969, and Macmillan, 1972). --------- . The History of Florence, trans. Mario Domandi (N ew York: Harper and Row, 1970). Hammond, Henry. The Works of Dr. Henry Hammond (London, 4 vols., 1671-1684). Harrington, James. Oceana and Other Works, ed. John Toland (Lon­ don, 17 7 1 ).

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Montesquieu, Charles Secondat, Baron. Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). Nedham, Marchmont. Mercurius Politicus (London, 1650-1660). --------- . The Case of the Commonwealth of England Stated, ed. Philip A. Knachel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1969). Neville, Henry. Plato Redivivus (London, 1680), ed. Caroline Robbins, in Two English Republican Tracts (Cambridge University Press, 1969). Parker, Henry. Observations upon Some of His Majesty's Late Answers and Expresses (London, 1642). Polybius. The Histories, trans. E. S. Shuckburgh, ed. F. W . Walbank (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962). Ralegh, Sir Walter. Works, ed., with lives by W . Oldys and T . Birch (Oxford University Press, 1829). Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Political Writings of J. J. Rousseau, ed. C. E. Vaughan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962). Rushworth, John, ed. Historical Collections of Private Passages of State (London, 1659-1701).

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delle Opere di Girolamo Savonarola (Rome: Belardotti, 1955). Sidney, Algernon. Discourses on Government, 3d ed. (London, 17 5 1).

Smith, Adam. Moral and Political Philosophy (N ew York: Hafner,

1948). --------- . An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: J. M. Dent, 1910, 1950).

Squire, Samuel. An Enquiry into the Foundation of the English Consti­ tution (London, 1745). --------- . An Historical Essay upon the Balance of Civil Power in Eng­ land (London, 1748). Sw ift, Jonathan. The Examiner, ed. H. Davis (O xford: Basil Blackwell,

1957)--------- . The History of the Four Last Years of the Queen, ed. H. Davis (O xford: Basil Blackwell, 1964). --------- . Political Tracts, i j ii - 14 , ed. H. Davis (O xford: Basil Blackwell, 1964). --------- . A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome, ed. Frank H. Ellis (O xford: T h e Clarendon Press, 1967). Toland, John. The Art of Governing by Parties (London, 17 0 1). ---------. The State Anatomy of Great Britain (London, 17 14 ). --------- . A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Toland, ed. Pierre Des Maizeaux (London, 1726). Trenchard, John, with W alter M oyle. An Argument showing that a

Standing Army is Inconsistent with a Free Government and Abso­ lutely Destructive to the Constitution of the English Monarchy (London, 1697). Trenchard, John, with Thomas Gordon. Cato's Letters: or Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects, 3d ed. (London, 1723).

Tucker, Josiah. Four Tracts on Political and Commercial Subjects (London, 1774). -------- . A Letter to Edmund Burke, Esq. (London, 1775). --------- . The True Interest of Britain (London, 1776). --------- . A Treatise Concerning Civil Government (London, 17 8 1). Woodhouse, A .S.P., ed. Puritanism and Liberty (London: J. M. Dent,

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Secondary Literature: Books

Albertini, R. von. Das florentinische Staatsbewusstsein im ubergang von der Republik zum Prinzipat (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1955). Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition (N ew York: Viking, 1958). --------- . On Revolution (Chicago University Press, 1963). Baron, Hans. Humanistic and Political Literature in Florence and Venice at the Beginning of the Quattrocento (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955). --------- . The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 2d ed. (Princeton University Press, 1966). --------- . From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni: Studies in Humanist and Political Literature (Chicago University Press, 1968). Bailyn, Bernard. Political Pamphlets of the American Revolution, / (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1965). --------- . The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cam­ bridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1967). --------- . The Origins of American Politics (N ew York: Vintage Books, 1970). Bayley, C. C. War and Society in Renaissance Florence (University of Toronto Press, 1961).

Berman, Marshall. The Politics of Authenticity (New York: Atheneum, 1970). Blitzer, Charles. An Immortal Commonwealth: The Political Thought of James Harrington (N ew Haven: Yale University Press, i960). Bloom, Edward A. and Lillian D. Joseph Addison's Sociable Animal: in the Market Place, on the Hustings, in the Pulpit (Providence: Brown University Press, 1971). Boorstin, Daniel. The Genius of American Politics (Chicago Univer­ sity Press, 1953). --------- . The Americans: the Colonial Experience (N ew York: Random House, 1958). Bouwsma, William J. Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter-Reformation (Berke­ ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968). Brandt, William J. The Shape of Medieval History: Studies in Modes of Perception (N ew Haven: Yale University Press, 1966).

Bryson, Gladys. Man and Society: the Scottish Enquiry of the Eight­ eenth Century (Princeton University Press, 1945). Butterfield, Sir Herbert. The Statecraft of Machiavelli (London: G. Bell and Son, 1940, 1955). --------- . George 111, Lord North and the People (London: G. Bell and Son, 1949). 590

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Chambers, W illiam N . Old Bullion Benton: Senator from the New West (Boston: Little, Brow n and Company, 1956). --------- . Political Parties in a New Nation: The American Experience, 1776-1809 (N ew Y ork: O xford University Press, 1963). Christie, Ian R . Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform: The Parliamentary Reform Movement in British Politics, 1760-85 (N ew Y ork: St. M ar­ tin’s Press, 1962). --------- . Myth and Reality in Late Eighteenth-century British Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970).

Cochrane, Charles Norris. Christianity and Classical Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957). Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium, 2d ed. (N ew York: Harper and R ow , 19 6 1). Colbourn, H. T revor. The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Beginnings of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of N orth Carolina Press, 1965).

Conklin, George Newton. Biblical Criticism and Heresy in Milton (N ew York: King’s Crown Press, 1949). Cook, Richard I. Jonathan Swift as a Tory Pamphleteer (Seattle and London: U niversity of Washington Press, 1967).

Cosenza, Mario E. Petrarch's Letters to Classical Authors (Chicago University Press, 1910). Cranston, Maurice and Peters, R. S., eds. Hobbes and Rousseau (N ew Y ork: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1972). Cumming, Robert D. Human Nature and History (Chicago Univer­ sity Press, 2 vols., 1969). De Caprariis, Vittorio. Francesco Guicciardini: dalla politica alia storia (Bari: Laterza, 1950). Dickinson, H. T . Bolingbroke (London: Constable, 1970). Dickson, P .G .M . The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit (London: Macmillan, 1967). Dorey, T . A ., ed. Tacitus (N ew Y ork: Basic Books, 1969). Dunn, John. The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical

Account of the Argument of the Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge U niversity Press, 1969). Earl, D. C. The Moral and Political Tradition of Rome (Ithaca: Cor­ nell U niversity Press, 1967). Ferguson, Arthur B. The Articulate Citizen and the English Renais­ sance (Durham, N .C .: Duke University Press, 1965). Ferguson, John. The Religions of the Roman Empire (Ithaca: Cornell U niversity Press, 1970). 591

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Fink, Z. S. The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth-Century England (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1945). Fleisher, Martin, ed. Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought (N ew York: Atheneum, 1972). Foot, Michael. The Pen and the Sword (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1 9 5 7 ) •

Frank, Joseph. The Beginnings of the English Newspaper (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 19 61). Gardner, Lloyd C. A Different Frontier: Selected Readings in the Foundations of American Economic Expansion (Chicago: Quad­ rangle Books, 1966). Garin, Eugenio. Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance, trans. Peter Munz (N ew Y ork: Harper and R ow , 1965). Giarrizzo, Giuseppe. Hume politico e storico (Turin: Einaudi, 1962). Gilbert, Felix. To the Farewell Address: Ideas of American Foreign Policy (Princeton University Press, 1961, 1970). --------- . Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in SixteenthCentury Florence (Princeton University Press, 1965). Gilm ore, M yron P., ed. Studies in Machiavelli (Florence: Sansoni, 1972). Goetzmann, W illiam H., ed. The American Hegelians: An Episode in the Intellectual History of Western America (N ew Y ork: A lfred A. K nopf, 1973). Gummere, Richard M. The American Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition: Essays in Comparative Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: H ar­ vard University Press, 1963). Gunn, J.A .W . Factions No More: Attitudes to Party in Government and Opposition in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Frank Cass, 1972). G w y n , W . B. The Meaning of the Separation of Powers: An Analysis

of the Doctrine from its Origin to the Adoption of the United States Constitution (N ew Orleans: Tulane Studies in Political Science, 1965). H aley, K .H .D . The First Earl of Shaftesbury (O xford: The Clarendon Press, 1968). Haller, William. Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (Lon­ don: Jonathan Cape, 1963). Hanson, Donald W . From Kingdom to Commonwealth: The Develop­ ment of Civic Consciousness in English Political Thought (Cam­ bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970). Haraszti, Zoltan. John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cam­ bridge, Mass.: Harvard U niversity Press, 1952). 592

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Hartz, Louis B. The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (N ew York: Harcourt Brace, 1955). Hexter, J. H. The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation: More, Machiavelli, Seyssel (N ew York: Basic Books, 1972). Hill, Christopher. Puritanism and Revolution (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1958). --------- . Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (N ew York: Schocken Books, 1964). --------- . Antichrist in Seventeenth-century England (London: Oxford University Press, 1971). Hofstadter, Richard C. The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legiti­ mate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969). Holmes, George. The Florentine Enlightenment, 1400-1450 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969). Howe, John R., Jr. The Changing Political Thought of John Adams (Princeton University Press, 1966). Huffman, C. C. Coriolanus in Context (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univer­ sity Press, 1972). Jacob, E. F., ed. Italian Renaissance Studies (N ew York: Barnes and Noble, i960). Jacobson, David L., ed. The English Libertarian Heritage (Indianapo­ lis: Bobbs Merrill, 1965). Jordan, W . K. Men of Substance: A Study of the Political Thought of Two English Revolutionaries, Henry Parker and Henry Robinson (Chicago University Press, 1942). Judson, Margaret. The Political Thought of Sir Henry Vane the Younger (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969). Kelley, Donald R. The Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law and History in the French Renaissance (N ew York: Columbia University Press, 1970). Kenyon, J. P., ed. The Stuart Constitution, 1603-88 (Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1966). Kettler, David. The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965). Kluxen, Kurt. Das Problem der Politischen Opposition: Entwicklung

und Wesen der englischen Zweiparteienpolitik im 18 Jahrhundert (Freiburg and Munich, 1956). Koebner, Richard. Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1961). Kramnick, Isaac F. Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nos­ talgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). 593

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Ladner, Gerhart B. The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959). Lamont, William M. Marginal Prynne, 1600-69 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963). ---------. Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603-60 (London: Mac­ millan, 1969). Laprade, W . T . Public Opinion and Politics in Eighteenth-century England to the Fall of Walpole (N ew Y ork: Macmillan, 1936). Leff, Gordon. Heresy in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester Univer­ sity Press, 2 vols., 1967).

Lefranc, Pierre. Sir Walter Ralegh Ecrivain (Paris: Armand Colin, 1968).

Lehmann, W . C. John Millar of Glasgow (Cambridge University Press, i960). Letwin, William. The Origin of Scientific Economics (N ew Y ork: Doubleday Anchor, 1965).

Levenson, Joseph R. Liang ChH-ch'ao and the Mind of Modern China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953, *959)--------- . Confucian China and its Modern Fate (Berkeley and Los Ange­ les: University of California Press, 3 vols., 1958-1965). L ev y , F. J. Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1967). Lewis, C. S. Selected Literary Essays (Cambridge University Press, i 969 >Mansfield, H arvey C., Jr. Statesmanship and Party Government (Chi­ cago University Press, 1965). Manuel, Frank E. Shapes of Philosophical History (Stanford Univer­ sity Press, 1965). Markus, R . A. Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge University Press, 1970). Marx, Leo. The Machine and the Garden: Technology and the Pas­ toral Ideal in America (N ew York: Oxford University Press, 1964). Mazzeo, J. A. Renaissance and Seventeenth-century Studies (N ew Y ork: Columbia U niversity Press, 1964). Molho, Anthony, and Tedeschi, John A., eds. Renaissance: Studies in Honor of Hans Baron (Florence: Sansoni, and DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 19 7 1).

Mosse, George L. The Holy Pretence: A Study in Christianity and Reason of State from William Perkins to John Winthrop (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957). 594

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M cllw ain, C. H. Constitutionalism A ncient and M odern (Ithaca: Cor­ nell U niversity Press, Great Seal Books, 1958). Macpherson, C. B. T h e Political T h eory o f Possessive Individualism: from H obbes to L ocke (O xford: T h e Clarendon Press, 1962). Nisbet, Robert F. Social Change and H istory: Aspects o f the W estern T heory o f D evelopm ent (N ew Y ork: Oxford University Press, 1969). N oble, David W . Historians against H istory: T he Frontier Thesis and the National Covenant in Am erican Historical W riting since 1830 (Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press, 1965). O ’M alley, John W . Giles o f Viterbo on Church and R eform : A Study in Renaissance Thought (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968). Parker, Harold T . T h e Cult o f Antiquity and the French Revolution­ aries: A Study in the D evelopm ent o f the Revolutionary Spirit (Chi­

cago University Press, 1937). Patch, H. R . T h e G oddess Fortuna in M edieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927). Plumb, J. H. T h e G ro w th o f Political Stability in England, 1660-1730 (London: Macmillan, 1967). Pocock, J.G .A . T h e A ncient Constitution and the Feudal L a w : English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1957, and N e w Y ork: W . W . Norton, 1967). ---------. Politics, Language and Tim e: Essays in Political Thought and H istory (N ew Y ork: Atheneum, 19 7 1; London: Methuen, 1972). Pole, J. R . Political Representation in England and the Origins o f the Am erican R epublic (London: Macmillan; N e w Y ork: St. Martin’s Press, 1969). Raab, Felix. T h e English Face o f M achiavelli (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, and U niversity of Toronto Press, 1964). Rawson, Elizabeth. T h e Spartan Tradition in European Thought (O xford: T h e Clarendon Press, 1969). Reeves, M arjorie. T h e Influence o f Prophecy in the Later M iddle A ges: A Study in Joachism (O xford: The Clarendon Press, 1969). Richards, James O. Party Propaganda under Queen A nn e: T he G en ­ eral Elections o f 17 0 2 -13 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972). Ridolfi, Roberto. Opuscoli di Storia Letteraria e di Erudizione (Flor­ ence: Libr. Bibliopolis, 1942).

-------- . Life of Girolamo Savonarola, trans. C. Grayson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959). -------- . Life of Niccolo Machiavelli, trans. C. G rayson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962). 595

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Ridolfi, Roberto. Li f e of Francesco G uicciardini, trans. C. Grayson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967). Robbins, Caroline A. T h e Eighteenth-century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, D evelopm ent and Circumstances of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration o f Charles 11 until the W ar with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni­

versity Press, 1959). --------- , ed. T w o English Republican Tracts (Cambridge University Press, 1969).

Rossiter, Clinton. Seedtime o f the R epublic: The Origin of the A m eri­ can Tradition o f Political Liberty (New York: Harcourt Brace,

r95 3 )• Rowe, J. G., and Stockdale, W . H., eds. Florilegium Historiale: Essays Presented to Wallace K . Ferguson (University of Toronto Press, 1971). Rubini, Dennis. Court and C ountry, 1688-1702 (London: Rupert HartDavis, 1967). Rubinstein, Nicolai, ed. Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence (London: Faber and Faber, 1968). Seigel, Jerrold E. Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: T he Union o f Eloquence and W isdom , Petrarch to Valla (Princeton University Press, 1968). Shackleton, Robert. M ontesquieu: A Critical Biography (O xford: The Clarendon Press, 19 6 1). Shklar, Judith. M en and Citizens: A Study o f Rousseau's Social Theory (Cambridge U niversity Press, 1969). Silberschmidt, Max. T he United States and Europe: Rivals and Partners (N ew Y ork: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972). Simon, Renee. H enry de Boulainviller: historien, politique, philosophey astrologue, 16 58 -1722 (Paris: Boivin, 19 4 1) . --------- . Un revoke du grand siecle: H enry de Boulainviller (Garches: Editions du nouvel humanisme, 1948). Smith, H enry Nash. Virgin Land: T h e Am erican W est as Sym bol and M yth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950; N ew Y ork: Vintage Books, n.d.). Sperlin, Paul M. Rousseau in A m erica, 1760-1809 (U niversity of A la­ bama Press, 1969). Starns, Randolph. Donato Giannotti and H is Epistolae (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1968). Starr, Chester G . The A w akening o f the G reek Historical Spirit (N ew Y ork: Alfred A. K nopf, 1968).

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Stewart, John B. T h e M oral and Political Philosophy o f D avid H um e (N ew Y ork: Columbia University Press, 1963). Stourzh, Gerald. Alexander Hamilton and the Idea o f Republican G o v ­ ernment (Stanford University Press, 1970). Strauss, E. Sir W illiam Petty: Portrait o f a Genius (London: The Bod-

ley Head, 1954). Struever, N an cy S. T h e Language o f H istory in the Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 1970). Sydnor, Charles S. Gentlem en Freeholders: Political Practice in Wash­ ington's Virginia (Chapel Hill: U niversity of N orth Carolina Press, 1952). ---------. Am erican Revolutionaries in the M aking (N ew York: The Free Press, 1965). Thompson, David, and N agel, Alan F., eds. T he T hree Crowns of Florence: Humanist Assessments o f Dantef Petrarch and Boccaccio (N e w Y ork: Harper and R ow , 1972). Tuveson, Ernest. M illennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background o f the Idea o f Progress (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of

California Press, 1949). ---------. T h e Redeem er N ation: T h e Idea o f Am erica's Millennial R ole (U niversity o f Chicago Press, 1968). Ullmann, W alter. Principles o f G overnm ent and Politics in the M iddle A ges (London: Methuen, 19 6 1). --------- . History o f Political Thought in the M iddle A ges (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965). --------- . T h e Individual and Society in the M iddle A ges (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U niversity Press, 1966). Underdown, David. Pride's Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (O xford: T h e Clarendon Press, 19 7 1). Varese, Claudio. Storia e Politica nella Prosa del Quattrocento (Turin: Einaudi, 19 6 1). Venturi, Franco. Utopia and R eform in the Enlightenm ent (Cambridge U niversity Press, 19 7 1). V ile, M .J.C . Constitutionalism and the Separation o f Pow ers (O xford: Th e Clarendon Press, 1967). Von Fritz, K. T h e T heory o f the M ixed Constitution in Antiquity

(N ew York: Columbia University Press, 1954). W ade, Ira O. T h e Clandestine Organisation and Diffusion o f Philo­ sophic Ideas in France from 1700 to 1750 (Princeton University Press, 1938). Walbank, F. W . A n Historical Commentary on Polybius (Oxford:

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W allace, John M. Destiny His Choice: T he Loyalism o f A n d rew M ar­ vell (Cambridge University Press, 1968). Walzer, Michael. T he Revolution o f the Saints: A Study in the Origins o f Radical Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965).

Ward, John William. Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955). Weinstein, Donald. Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 1970). Western, J. R. T h e English Militia in the Eighteenth Century: T he Story o f a Political Issue, 1660-1802 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965). ---------. M onarchy and Revolution: T he English State in the 1680’s (London: Blandford Press, 1972). Weston, Corinne Comstock. English Constitutional Theory and the House of Lords (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965). W hitfield, J. H. Petrarch and the Renascence (N ew Y ork: Russell and Russell, 1965). --------- . Discourses on Machiavelli (Cambridge: W . HefFer and Sons, i 969 )* W ilkins, E. H. T h e Li fe of Petrarch (Chicago University Press, 19 6 1). Williams, S. H. The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia: T h e W est­ minster Press, 1962). W ood, Gordon S. The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of N orth Carolina Press, 1969). Yolton, John W ., ed. Jo h n L o cke: Problems and Perspectives (Cam­ bridge University Press, 1969).

c) Periodical Articles and Dissertations Banning, Lance G . “ The Quarrel with Federalism: A Study in the Ori­ gins and Character of Republican Thought,” Ph.D. dissertation, W ashington University, 1972.

Baron, Hans. “ Machiavelli: The Republican Citizen and the Author of The Prince,” English Historical Review y6 (19 6 1), 217-53. --------- . “ Leonardo Bruni,” Past and Present 36 (1967), 21-37.

Forbes, Duncan. “ Politics and History in David Hume,” The Historical Journal 6, no. 2 (19 6 3), 280-94. Fuss, Peter. “ Hannah Arendt’s Conception of Political Community,” Idealistic Studies 3, no. 3 (1973), 252-65. Gilbert, Felix. “ Bernardo Rucellai and the Orti Oricellari: A Study in the Origin of Modern Political Thought,” Journal o f the W arburg and Courtauld Institutes 12 (1949), 10 1-3 1.

598

B IB L IO G R A P H Y

---------. “ T h e Composition and Structure of Machiavelli’s Discorsi,” Journal o f the H istory o f Ideas 14, no. 1 (19 5 3), 136-56. ---------. “ Florentine Political Assumptions in the Period of Savonarola and Soderini,” Journal o f the W arburg and Courtauld Institute 20 ( r957)> 187-214. ---------. “ T h e Date of the Composition of Contarini’s and Giannotti’s Books on Venice,” Studies in the Renaissance 14 (1967), 172-84. Lamont, W illiam M. “ Richard Baxter, the Apocalypse and the Mad M ajor,” Past and Present 55 (19 7 2), 68-90. Maclean, A . H. “ George Lawson and John Locke,” Cam bridge H is­ torical Journal 9, no. 1 (194 7), 69-77. Pocock, J.G .A . “ T h e O nely Politician: Machiavelli, Harrington and Felix Raab,” Historical Studies: Australia and N e w Zealand 12, no. 46 (1966), 165-96. --------- . “ James Harrington and the Good Old Cause: A Study of the Ideological Context of His W ritings,” Journal o f British Studies 10, no. 1 (1970 ), 30-48. ---------. “ V irtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal o f Interdisciplinary H istory 3, no. 1 (19 7 2 ), 119-34. Ranum, Orest. “ Personality and Politics in the Persian Letters,” Politi­ cal Science Quarterly 84, no. 4 (1969), 606-27. Riesenberg, Peter. “ Civism and Roman L aw in Fourteenth-century Italian Society,” Explorations in Econom ic H istory 7, nos. 1-2 (1969), 237-54. R obey, David. “ P. P. V ergerio the Elder: Republicanism and Civic Values in the W ork of an E arly Humanist,” Past and Present 58 0 9 7 3 )) 3 - 3 7 -

Rosenmeier, Jesper. “ N ew England’s Perfection: Th e Image of Adam and the Image of Christ in the Antinomian Crisis, 1634 to 1638,” William and M ary Q uarterly, 3d ser., vol. 27, no. 3 (1970), pp.

435- 59Rubini, Dennis. “ Politics and the Battle for the Banks, 1688-97,” English Historical R e v iew 85 (19 70 ), 693-714. Sanesi, G . R ., ed. “ U n discorso sconosciuto di Donato Giannotti sulla milizia,” A rch ivio Storico Italiano, ser. 5, vol. 8 (18 9 1), pp. 2-27. Schwoerer, Lois F. “ The Literature of the Standing A rm y Contro­ versy,” Huntington Library Quarterly 28 (1964-1965), 187-212. Seigel, Jerrold E. “ Civic Humanism or Ciceronian Rhetoric?” Past and Present 34 (1966), 3-48. Shackleton, Robert. “ Montesquieu, Bolingbroke and the Separation of Pow ers,” French Studies 3 (1949), 25-38. Skinner, Quentin. “ Hobbes’s Leviathan,” T he Historical Journal 7, no. 2 (

1964)1 3 21_ 3 2 599

B IB L IO G R A P H Y

Skinner, Quentin. “ H istory and Ideology in the English Revolution,” The Historical Journal 8, no. 2 (1965), 151-78. --------- . “ T h e Ideological Context o f Hobbes’s Political Thought,” The Historical Journal 9, no. 3 (1966), 286-317. Starr, Chester G . “ H istory and the Concept of Tim e,” History and Theory , Beiheft 6 (1966), 24-35. W allace, John M. “ The Engagement Controversy, 1649-52: A n Anno­ tated List o f Pamphlets,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 68 (1964), 384-405. W alzer, Michael. “ Exodus 32 and the T h eo ry of H o ly W ar: T h e His­ tory of a Citation,” Harvard Theological Review 6 1, no. 1 (1968), 1-14 . W eddell, D. “ Charles Davenant (16 5 6 -17 14 )— a Biographical Sketch,” Economic History Review , ser. 2, vol. 11 (1958-1959), pp. 279-88. W eston, Corinne Comstock. “ Legal Sovereignty in the Brady Contro­ versy,” The Historical Journal 15, no. 3 (19 72), 409-32. Williamson, Arthur H. “ Antichrist’s Career in Scotland: T h e Im agery o f E vil and the Search for a National Past,” Ph.D. dissertation, W ash­ ington University, 1973. Zagorin, Perez, ed. “ Sir Edward Stanhope’s A dvice to Thomas W ent­ w orth,” The Historical Journal 7, no. 2 (1964), 298-320.

600

IN D E X

absolute, 26, 28, 30, 345; authority (king’s), 352, 353, 397; monarchy, •59, 355. 362, 417, 422, 474, 477, 494; power, 352-53, 481; absolutes, moral,

552

p r i n c i p e a s s o l u t o , 236 accidental circumstance, 533 accidents, 140, 188, 237, 251, 429 a c c i d e n t i , 341 action: Calvinist, 336; civic ideal, 56, 58, 59, 63-66, 229, 386, 394, 445, 521, 550-52; conservative and radical, 337, 375; contemplation and, 38, 68, 276; c o r p u s m i s t i c u m and, 334; Giannotti and, 319-20; Guicciardini’s attitude, 220, 225, 267; compared with Machia­ velli’s, 269; historical, 430, 486; knowledge and, 99, 157; in Machia­ velli, 166-67, 178, 218, 269, 318; modes of in English thought, 338, 341* 344» 348, 37M the republic a structure of, 202; in the speculative society, 440-41 a z i o n e , 301 activism, 334, 336, 551 activity, 67, 68, 73, 74, 328, 354, 391, 446, 480, 521; civic, 349-50, 486 Adams, John, 128, 317, 395, 512, 526, 531, 546; D e f e n c e o f t h e C o n s t i t u t i o n s o f t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s , 526-31; D i s s e r t a ­ tion o n

the C a n o n

a nd Feudal L a w s

, 99 Agathocles of Syracuse, 152 agrarian: democracy, 535, 541; laws, 210, 21 in, 468-69, 485, 534; legislators, 388; man, 538; property, 436; republic, 534, 543; society, 534, 538; territory, 391-99; utopia, 470; virtue, 533; warriors, 536 agrarianism, 532 A g r e e m e n t o f t h e P e o p l e , the, 375 Alamanni, Lodovico, 145, 151, 154, 156, 160, 165, 176, 180, 210, 266n, 286, 413 Alamanni, Luigi, 15 m, 293n-294n Albizzi, Rinaldo degli, 143 Alexander V I, Pope: s e e pope alienation, ix, 72, 336, 343, 346, 360, 374, 458, 466, 502-3; of personality, 504-5 ambition, 132-35, 138, 141, 145-47, 153, 231-32, 259, 263, 312, 323, 533 a m b i z i o n e ( i), 15m , 228, 243, 252-53, 259, 26on America, ix, 218, 333, 442, 486, 506-50; American apocalyptic, 511-12 , 542-43; colonies, 392, 410, 442, 467-68, 505-10, 515; Constitution, 462, 513, 527-28, 53". 534. 537. 539. 544'. culture, 543-45; history, 505, 541, 543-44; myth, 537, 542, 545 (a n d s e e metahistory); par­ ties, 528-29, 531-32; republic, 528, 533* 539* 546; Revolution, 85, 315, 462, 467, 506, 508, 513, 516, 527, 546, 548; revolutionaries, 516; revolution­ ary army, 527; social consciousness and thought, 506, 527, 541, 546, 548-49, 551; values, 330, 462, 532; West, 534; work ethic, 551; work force, 551 a m m i n i s t r a z i o n e , 274, 299, 309n agape

,

512

Adams, John Quincy, 536, 538 Addison, Joseph, 426, 446-48, 452, 45558, 464-65; T h e S p e c t a t o r , 447-48, 455-56; the F r e e h o l d e r , 447 a e t e r n i t a s m u n d i , 217

601

INDEX

, a m o u r d e s o i - m e m e , 465489 ( a n d s e e self) a n a k u k l d s i s p o l i t e i o n , 77, 116, 333, 370, 379, 387, 401, 493, 5 11, 513 cycle, cyclical) anarchy, 77, 367, 417 Ancient Constitution, the, 340, 342, 347, 359, 366, 371, 372, 375, 3^5, 389, n 409, 416-20, 429, 441, 450, 455, 458, 473, 482, 493, 547 ancient prudence, 429, 433 angel(s), 21, 22, 324, 327 Anne, Queen, 426, 446, 478, 485-86, 529

amour-propre

67,

A n s w e r

to t h e N i n e t e e n P r o p o s i t i o n s o f

Majesty’ s, 361-66, 368, 377, 384, 388, 404, 408-9, 413-14, 416, 420, 479, 481, 497 Antichrist, 107, 343-45, 382, 396, 398, 512, 543 Antifederalists, the, 531 antinomianism, antinomians, 337, 346Parliament, His

47, 373, 375, 378 antiquarians, antiquaries, 341, 386 antiquity, 14, 16-19, 23, 24, 27, 54, 62, 93, 1 ! 5, *77* J9i» 334* 341, 345, 348, 354. 359. 4>8, 42>. 434. 5* 1. 529; of the commons, 404; immemorial, 405; prescriptive, 547; Spartan and Roman, 548 a n t i q u i t a , i59n apocalypse (apocalyptic, apocalypti­ cism), 34, 333, 403, 433, 493, 541; American, 511-13 , 532, 540-42; Brightman’s, 346; Cola di Rienzo’s, 51; Dante’s, 50-52; English, 337, 342-45, 360, 396, 512; at Florence, 113 ; Foxe’s, 346; Harrington’s, 385, 399, 401, 476; history, 104; Hobbes’s, 397, 401, 476; medieval heretics’, 45-47; mode, 104; moment, 108, 110-12, 344, 375; the Puritan radicals’, 373-75, 378-79; in Rousseau, 504; Savonarola’s, 104-10, 136, 215, 319, 344; apocalyptic Whiggism, 403, 512 Appalachians, the, 5 11, 540 appeal: to heaven, 367-68, 371, 374; to providence, 378-89 appetite, 222, 235, 486, 496, 522 a p p e t i t o , 222; u n i v e r s a l e , 225, 259^

29on, 293n approvazione

, 255, 287, 480

355; a r c a n a i m p e r i i , 28, 48; arcane art, 352, 354 architect (fig.), 296 Arendt, Hannah, 550 a r e t e , 37 aristocracy, 69-73, 77, 100-103, n 9» arcana,

*35, J 39, *45, 2I2, 2 *9, 237, 2 354-55. 357. 359. distribution of, 66, 70, 283, 388; in Fortescue, 19; in Hume, 393-95, 508-9; a king’s, 28-30, 334-35, 348, 354-55, 358-59; king and parliament’s, 361, 363, 368; legitimate, 366-70, 377; Leviathan’s, 397, 475; the magistrate’s, 127; moral, 350; natural, 485; the peers’, 414; prophetic, 379; public, 126, 200, 227, 253, 291, 326, 356, 407, 4 11, 464, 469, 537; representative, 517; the ruling class’s, 473; secular, 343, 345, 396; spiritual, 398; universal, 50, 437; un­ written, 13 autocrat, 474-75, 477 : autonomy, 211, 213, 329, 430, 435, 441, s 463, 464, 466, 486, 551 \ Bacon, Francis, 9, 357, 386; E s s a y s , 357; H e n r y V I I , 352, 357, 388 ] Bailyn, Bernard, 507, 509, 513 I balance, the classical, 404, 482, 486; in

Revolutions of G o v e r n ­

m e n t , 379 Asia, J42, 544 associations, 64, 67, 69, 524; natural, 520 astrology, 95, 221 Athens, 69, 74, 88, 189, 382, 500, 504; Modern (s e e Edinburgh); Athenian, philosophy, 102; tradition, 64-66; Athenians, 168 Atlantic, the, 330, 392, 546; political culture, 506-7; thought, 395; world, 186 Atwood, William, 417-18, 421 audacity, 198, 232, 238, 269, 543

A n s w e r

to th e N i n e t e e n P r o p o s i t i o n s ,

361-65, 413; in C a t o ' s L e t t e r s , 474; in Contarini, 325-26; in Davenant, 441; in Defoe, 432-34; of the English constitution, 441, 450, 458; in Fed­ eralist theory, 525-26; in Fletcher, 428-29; in Florentine constitution of 1494, 103; and fortune, 371; in H u m b l e P e t i t i o n a n d A d v i c e , 384; in Hume, 494; in Hunton, 366-67; in land and trade, 391; in Madison, 522-23; in Nedham, 382; in the neo-

603

IN D E X balance ( c o n t .) Harringtonians, 420; the Polybian, 77, 349; of power, 454, 482, 488; of property, 417; the republican, 548; the social, 497 balanced: constitution, 189, 197, 385, 414, 434, 459, 469, 479-81; distribution of powers, 3 11; republic, 349 ( a n d s e e government) ballot(s), 261, 390, 393 bank(s), 412, 478; Bank of England, 425. 433. 442. 449. 45'. 4551the United States, 528, 530, 535; banking, 547 bankruptcy, 496 barbarians, 217, 277 barbarism, 54, 499 Barbaro, Francesco, 100, io2n baron(s), 164, 210, 302, 419, 428-29, 432, 483, 493, 516; baronage, 386, 393. 4i8-'9 b a r o n i , 164 Baron, Hans, ix, 52, 56-58, 87, 90 b e n e f i c i a t i , 291 Bentham, Jeremy (F r a g m e n t o n G o e r n m e n t ), 547 Benton, Thomas Hart, 542 Berkeley, Bishop, 5 11, 539-40, 542; Verses

on

the P r o s p e c t

v ­

of the A r t s

, 511 Bernardo del Nero, 221-27, 231-41, 243-47, 249-53, 258-65, 460 Blackstone, Sir William, 547 Bodin, Jean, 30, 340 body: natural, 275; politic, 203, 204, 275, 334. 340. 369. 443; and soul, and

Learning

in A m e r i c a

296, 300 Boethius, 7, 38, 40, 76, 92, 350; D e C o n s o l a t i o n e P h i l o s o p h i a e , 36, 39; analysis, 349; tradition, 157 Bolingbroke, Lord, 424, 427, 434, 446-47, 476, 478-86, 488, 491, 496, 507-8, 514, 528, 531; T h e C r a f t s m a n , 427, 478, 482 Boone, Daniel, 535, 550 Boorstin, Daniel, 509 Borgia, Cesare, 149, 150, 175-76, 181,

205n Boulainvilliers, Henri de, 476 bourgeois: ideology, 432, 460-61, 550; rationalism, 338 bourgeoisie, 434, 550

Bouwsma, William J., x, 327 Brady, Robert, 404, 418, 421, 482, 493; Brady controversy, the, 406 and n, 421 Brightman, Thomas, 347 Britain: (legendary), 342; (modern), 423, 468, 488, 508-10, 546-47 British constitution, 486, 494, 514, 528; government, 508; thought, 525, 548 Brown, John, 484-85 Bruni, Leonardo, ix, 52, 56, 59, 62, 85, 89, 91, 203, 305, 392, 395, 402; works of: L a u d a t i o F l o r e n t i n a e U r bis, 87; Dialogi ad P e t r u m

87;

P a u l u m

Hist r u m

Historiarum Populi Florentine

,

87;

M i l i t i a , 87, 88; O r a t i o F u n e b r i s , 87, 88; “ On the Polity of the Floren­ tines,” 89; H i s t o r i e s , 89 Brutus, 52-54, 308, 471 b u o n g o v e r n o , 305, 37n b u o n a e d u c a z i o n e , 195, 196, 212, 245, 432; f o r t u n a , 195; g i u s t i z i a , 125; m i l i ­ zia, 196, 197, 245, 305, 307n b u o n e a r m e , i78n, 432; l e g g i , i78n, *45, 432 b u o n i e s e m p l i , i78n; c o s t u m i , 204-5, 208; o r d i n i , 195, 196, 204, 245 bureaucracy, bureaucrats, 425; civilian, 412; military, 412, 419 Burgh, James (P o l i t i c a l D i s q u i s i t i o n s ) , 528 Burke, Edmund, 15, 24, 126, 404-5, 489, 519, 540, 547; Burkean ideas, 549 Bute, Lord, 507 Burr, Aaron, 529, 533, 541 D e

Caesar, Julius, 52-54, 201, 488, 510, 529, 53** 537* 548 Caesars, the, 277, 388 c a g i o n e (Giannotti), 279, 281, 282n, 301, 304 Calvin, Jean, 377; Calvinism, 337, 346; Scottish, 345; Calvinist: individual, 336; Calvinists, 339; predestinarianism, 405 Camillus, Furius, 537 capacity: civic, 37, 68, 74, 90, 129, 133, 232* 494-95* 5°2, 5 1 1 “ I2» 5*7; human, 339* 375; natural, 375 Capetians, 159 capital, 425, 451 capitalism, ix, 454, 460-61

604

IN D E X Capponi, Niccolo, 274, 286, 289-90, 295 Capponi, Piero, 220, 221, 223, 229, 243, 266 c a p r i c e s , 489 Cartwright, John, 547 c a s o , 194, 238n, 262n Cassius, 50, 53 Castiglione, Baldassare, 153 castles, 209, 210 “ casualties and caprice,” 532-33 casuistry, casuists, 360, 366-71, 377, 389 Catiline, 529 Cato: in Addison, 487; in Trenchard and Gordon, 467-77, 484, 489-91, 509; a historical figure, 471, 488, 529, 531, 533; Catonian Federalism, 531 caution, 232, 241 Cavalcanti, Giovanni, 91-98, 127, 453 centaur (fig.), 213, 353, 503, 532 Chambers, William N., 524 chance, 194, 262 change: and adaptation, 144; in A n s w e r t o t h e N i n e t e e n P r o p o s i t i o n s , 365; in Aristotle, 5; in Arm y radicalism, 373*, as corruption in Country thought, 420, 466, 477, 486; cyclical, 79; in eighteenth-century ideas, 423, 447; 450, 458-61, 487, 527; in external rela­ tions, 256; and the federal republic, 523; in Fletcher, 429-30; at Florence, 89, 117, 160, 221, 226; in Guicciar­ dini’s histories, 220-42; as irrational, 78-79; and men’s natures, 97; and the modern state, 329; qualitative, 208; republic and, 79, 112, 190, 328; and secular causation, 303, 317, 339, 357; time as dimension of, 26; in Venetian history, 281 c h a r i s m a , 37, 178, 179, 206 Charles I, of England and Scotland, 361, 388, 389^ 413; execution, 377 Charles V , empire of, 437 Charles V III, of France, 104 Chatham, Earl of, 510 checks and balances, 521, 522 c h i a r e z z a , 279, 282, 323 chiliasm, 337, 346; chiliasts, 403; premillennial, 346 choice, 430-32 Christ, 50, 6on, 1 1 1, i2 3n, 215, 342, 378; Bride of, 396, 399; reign of,

( r e g n w n C h r i s t i ), 344, 378, 398-99, 400n, 5 11; return of, 343, 396-97 Christian: church, 34; doctrine of sal­ vation, 31; empire, 34; humanists, 76; intellect, 6; laws, 14, 43 ; princes, 350; republic, 214; society, 43; thought, 8, 462; values, 463, 492-93; virtue (s),

75,

A i 33

Christianity, 192, 202, 214, 463, 492; Aristotelian, 7, 21, 96; Augustinian, 41, 67; medieval, 67 church, 34, 44-46, 105-7, 114, 190, 21415, 343, 347, 396, 462; of England, 329, 342; militant, 80, 342; reform, 348; universal, 342 Cicero, 25, 56, 61, i35n, 371 Cincinnati, Order of the, 527-28 citizen, Aristotle’s theory of, 67-69, 74, 132, 298, 329, 431; and arms, 88-90, 124-25, 199-201, 203-4, 209-10, 212, 238, 244-45, 291, 293-95, 381-83, 411, 492-93, 536; Athenian or Spartan, 74, 495; autonomy of, 441, 450, 458, 475; in capitalist thought, 458, 461; con­ versation among, 62, 65; and corrup­ tion, 75-76; and the courtier, 154; Englishman as, 334-36, 339-40, 350; in Ferguson, 499-501; and Florentine vocabulary, 83; and the frontiersman, 539; in Harrington, 387, 392-93, 412, 414; in humanist thought, 86-87, 92, 114-15, 156-57, 466, 510; ideal of, 49; knowledge and decision, 50, 62; and legislation, 264-65; and l i b e r t a , 226; and magic, 99; and man’s nature, 165, 316; as new prince, 160; the o t t i m a t i as, 102; and religion, 396-97, 463, 512-13; u m o r i of, 251; v irtii and j o r t u n a of, 184-85, 189-90, 366, 405, 524; his virtue requires differentiation and equality, 516, 524, 530 citizenship: active ideal of, 4, 56-57, 64, 66, 102, 337, 402, 507, 527; in Adam Smith, 502; in American thought, 521, 544; Aristotelian theory of, 6768, 74, 115, 117, 120; arms and, 89-90, 202, 213, 290; English conceptions of, 348-49; Florentine experience of, 143, 147, 165, 184; Florentine tradi­ tion, 101, 153; fortune and, 116; in Giannotti, 290, 292; in Guicciardini,

605

IN D E X citizenship (cont.) 317, 485; in Harrington, 385, 390, 416; humanist theory of, 75, 87; Ireton and, 376; justice and, 108; legislator the restorer of, 98; Machia­ velli and, 156-57, 160-61, 193, 202, 213, 386; prophecy and, 105; relation to Locke’s thought, 436; Romagna in­ capable of, 139; withdrawal from, 551 citta disarmata, 240, 252, 262, 270, 271, 272, 289 ^ city on a hill, 512 civic: action, 518; activism, 334; con­ sciousness, 59, 335-38, 340-41, 344, 347-48, 374-75; freedom, 165; ideal, 106, 241, 505; ideology, 550; individ­ ual, 250; language, 106; liberty, 467; life, 115, 295; man, 499; morality, 83, 518; personality, 240; Renaissance, 462; republicanism, 408-9; virtue, 74, 76, 80, 85-86, 98, 124, 184, 190-93, 196, 2 13 -15 ,2 17 ,2 4 3 ,3 16 ,3 2 2 ,3 4 9 ,3 8 5 , 389 399 432 436 441 42 450 471 485, 488, 500 civic humanism, 51, 58-60, 65, 67, 83, 91, 102, 104, 106, 114, 115, 157, 271,

, , , , -, , ,

335. 34°-4'. 384. 389- 42fi. 478, 486, 498, J07, 513. 517 civic humanist(s), vii, 66, 75, 87, 126, 127, 2 11, 23m, 232, 502; categories, 450; concepts, 333; in England, 386; ethos, 466; intellect, 467; succession, 446; tension, 549; thought, 3, 114, 116; tradition, 462, 499, 548; values, 461, 505 civilita, 153, 236n civility: Florentine, 88 civilization, 500-501 Civil W ar, English, 366-71, 401, 415; first, 368; thought, 366, 370; writers, 367 civitas: Dei, 34, 35, 39, 41, 45, 193, 462, 552; saecularis, 552; terrena, 34, 36, 39, 43, 53, 193 clansman (men), 501, 502 class: conflict, 549; struggle, 503 classical: analysis, 103, 548; antiquity, 54, 191; balance, 404, 482, 486; citizen, 336, 385; concept of citizenship, 337, 349, 371, 383; demagogues, 533; few, 515, 519; history, 537; humanist

premises, 527; image of man, 402; language, 514; legislators, 168, 379; mainstream, 478; many, 519; militia, 420; oikos, 464; one, few, and. many, 277, 495; paradigms, 100; politics, 527, 533, 537; populus, 409; principles, 90; rationality, 464; republic, 363, 399, 401, 466, 473, 537; republicanism, 3i 7, 527, 53i, 533', style, 484; terms, 382; theory, 122, 200, 505, 535; theory of corruption, 460, 502; time, 395; tone in Guicciardini, 241; tradition, 499, 518; types of government, 355, 387; values, 271; virtue, 466, 520, 522; virtus, 529 Clausewitz, Karl von, 536 Cleomenes of Sparta, 206 clergy, 382, 396-98, 400, 473, 476, 512 clique (s), 266, 315 Coke, Sir Edward, 16, 29, 404 Cola di Rienzo, 51, 105 Colepeper, Sir John, 361 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 495 Colonna, Fabrizio, 182 Collegio: Giannotti’s, designed for Florence, 311-13, 315; Venetian, 27783, 287, 311 commerce, ix, 425, 427, 431-34, 437, 439, 44i, 444, 453, 457-58, 462, 466, 470, 487, 490-95, 497-504, 522, 525, 527, 533-35, 538-39, 541, 543, 54 533, 54 historic, 384; mixed, 415, 416; traditional, 377, 414 ( a n d s e e America, ancient, balanced, British, Florentine) constitutional: humanism, 527; rhetoric and theory, 527 c o n s u e t u d i n e ( s e e custom) consul(s), consulate, 195, 239, 308 c o n s u l t a z i o n e (Giannotti), 287-88, 304, 3i 5 consumer goods, 435 c o n t a d i n i , 305; c o n t a d o , 147, 148, 176 Contarini, Gasparo, 271, 320-28, 394;

Magistratibus

et R e p u b l i c a

320-28 contemplation, 38, 56-59, 63, 65, 66, 68, 75, 78, 276, 544 contingency (ies), 5, 8, 9, 25, 157, 165, 166, 167, 169, 190, 268, 270 contingent: causes, 485; events, 3, 156; time, 30; world, 423 contract, the: Lockean, 545 contradiction, historical, 499, 503-5, 531, 549 conveniences and inconveniences, 362 convention, 451 conversation, 61-65 Cooper, Fenimore, 540 cook, the, 22; (fig.), 123, 137, 140, 308 c o r p o ( i ) m i s t o ( i ) , 204^ 214, 2i7n ( a n d s e e mixed) c o r p u s , 339 c o r p u s m i s t i c u m , 334, 353-54 corruption: and alienation, 502; and American thought, 507-17, 526, 5303i* 537-38, 541, 543-44* 545-46> 548-49, 550; as antithesis of virtue, viii-ix, 333* 33-'5, 35°, 382, 4°7, 5'9 ; clergy, 397; parliamentary, 377 election (religious), 112, 337, 344-45, 396-97, 549 Elect Nation, the, 337, 345-47, 371, 373, 396, 4°3 elite (s): the American, 507, 515-16, 520, 525; in Aristotle, 69-70, 73, 90; the English, 500; the Florentine o tti?)iati as, 118-19, 148, 1 5 1 , 1 5 3 , 1 5 6 ; in Giannotti, 278, 286-87, 313-14; in Guicciardini, 127, 131, 134 - 35, 1 38, *39, 145, 231_35, 249, 253-57, 259, 2^i, 262, 284, 3 11; and republican theory, 202, 485; the saints as, 395, 398 elitism, 132, 248 emperor, 50, 51, 53, 381, 388 empire, 50-51, 80, 197-99, 306, 342-43, 357, 444, 457, 46°, 4^2, 466, 4^9n, 493, 510-11, 513, 524, 529-35, 543, 547; American, 510, 529; British, 509-10; Christian, 34; commercial, 500, 510, 529; farmer’s, 539; fee-simple, 534, 539, 54*, 542; Roman ( s e e Rome); universal, 166; Whig, 546

609

INDEX

Engagement, the (1649) ; controversy over, 377, 379 England, viii, n , 13, 14, 44, 218, 329, 333-52, 355, 357, 361-62, 366-67, 372, 376-78, 380-81, 384-86, 388-89, 391-92, 395, 40I» 4° 5, 4° 9, 4*3, 4X5- I7, 423-24, 433, 441-43, 447, 466, 468, 472-73, 477, 493, 500, 531, 546; ancient liberties of, 337; Augustan, 531; becomes Britain, 423; church of, 347; civic humanism in, viii, 386, 499, 508; as a common­ wealth, 351, 519; in Continental wars, 424-25, 450; democratic ideas in, 383; an empire (1530), 341-42; mixed government in, 361-67; modernity of, 477; as a polis of republic, 330, 334, 350, 357, 380-82, 385, 392, 401, 414, 468; a trading nation, 424, 442 ( a n d s e e Britain) English antiquarianism, 341, 386; apocalypse, 44, 337, 342-47 (s e e a l s o Elect N ation); Atlantic, 546; Civil W ar, 335, 357, 361, 381, 410; common law, 9-19, 340-41; commonalty, 419; conservatism, 377; constitution, 528; constitutional theory, 408-20; Crown, 412; deism, 476-77; freeholder, 385, 413; government, 361-64, 416, 480; history, 302, 385-86, 395, 404, 427, 432, 467, 481, 493, 502, 515; humanism, 338-41, 347; individual, 370; Machiavellism, 360, 370, 380, 383, 385, 424; Englishman, Englishmen, 330, 335, 338, 340-41, 348, 356, 364, 366, 372, 428, 438-39, 453, 474 as citizen, 334, 336, 350, 385, 450; militia, 410, 414; moral consciousness, 85; opposition thought, 506; parlia­ mentary monarchy, 364, 405, 473, 518; past, 417; politics, 406, 426, 519; political order, 360; political rhetoric, 365; political thought, 361, 385, 395, 401, 423-24; republican tradition, 218, 395, 408, 476; Restoration, 405-6, 4 10 -11; revolutions, 85, 336; of 164849, 377; of 1688, 421, 422, 451, 479; saints, 337, 346, 375; scholars, 385-86; theorists, 509; thought, viii, 375, 403, 525; troops and armies abroad, 424, 427; yeoman, 357 Enlightenment, the, 85, 476-77

entrepreneur (s), 390, 456, 461, 495 enthusiasm: spirit of, 403 Epimonus de Garrula, 285 epistemology, 128, 486; of investment, 440; of money, 451; of the secular, 402; social, 461 equality, 72, 148, 208-10, 227, 254, 258, 279, 281, 284-85, 362, 374, 387, 396, 429, 468-70, 472-74, 481, 485-86, 49192, 516-17, 534, 537 ( a n d s e e i s o n o m i a ) e g a l i t e d e s c o n d i t i o n s , 537; e q u a l i t a , 227, 228, 251, 256, 29m, 468 equals, 387 equilibrium, 328, 368, 371, 432, 479, 503, 504 eschatological: dimension, 337; drama, 343; end, 374; restoration, 293; rhetoric, 400; scenario, 378-79 ( a n d s e e present) eschatology, 32-34, 43-46, 48, 104, 106, 217, 294, 541 eschaton, 34, 44, 45, 80, 84 e s p r i t , 251 estate(s), 349, 351-52, 354~55, 420, 450, 519; landed, 445; three, 361-62, 364, 384, 4° 9, 4*3 Este, rulers of Ferrara, 159, 176 eternal order, 49, 50, 53, 54, 56, 401 eternity, 343 ethic, ethos: Christian, 440, 491; civic, 491, 495 ; commercial, 441, 500; knight­ ly, 133; Protestant, 445-56; Roman senatorial, 36-37; warrior, 491; work, American, 550 ( a n d s e e virtue) eunuch, the, 475 Europe, ix, 74, 386, 392, 430, j i o , 546 European: history, 427, 467 exchange, 431, 436, 440, 444-45, 450, 458, 464, 492, 498, 538; of goods, 465, 502; value, 435 Exchange, the Royal, 456 executive, 128, 408-9, 412-13, 419-20, 427> 434, 45°, 469, 474. 478-79. 483. 487. 493-94, 5° 8-9, 5' 4. 5' 7. 52I> 5*5. 528-29; power, 488, 489; executive, judicial, legislative, 480, 521 e s e c u z i o n e (Giannotti), 287-88 Exclusion, Bill of, 406 Exclusionists, 404 expanding: democracy, 535; state, 289 expansion, 199, 210, 215, 310, 328, 357,

610

INDEX

392"93, 442> 524; of Rome, 305, 535, 539-43; 549 ( a n d s e e commonwealth) experience: in A n s w e r t o t h e ' N i n e ­ t e e n P r o p o s i t i o n s , 362; in Aristotelian theory, 22-26, 129, 212, 485, 514; Coke expounds to James I, 17; in Fortescue, 14-19, 59, 334; in Gian­ notti, 280-82, 303, 311, 312; grace and fortune, related to, 47-48, 49, 112, 115 ; in Guicciardini, 141, 219, 220, 221, 224-25, 227, 234-35, 238, 241, 251, 256-57, 261, 265; in Harrington, 395; and Hobbes, 399; humanism finds insufficient, 62, 65, 85, 93, 335; in Hume, 498; in Machiavelli, 172; in medieval kingship and law, 28-29; merchants accumulate it speedily, 91; in Montesquieu, 490; becomes opin­ ion in commercial society, 440, 457, 459-60, 465, 472; o t t i m a t i emphasize, 101; in parliament, 353-54; and par­ ticipation, 13 1; in Plato, 20; among representatives, 517; and spirit, 536 e s p e r i e n z i a , 227-28, 232, 234, 24m, 247^ 256, 262n, 263, 267^ 28m external relations, 237, 252, 256, 289, 313-14, 363, 425, 530 c o s e d i f u o r a , 237 faction(s), 143, 209, 321, 326, 362-64, 408, 439, 441, 447, 483-84, 507, 522, 525, 535 f a z i o n e , 309 Fairfax, Sir Thomas, 373 faith, 7, 40-44, 47-49, 114, i i j , 270, 294, 318. 333, 445. 55° Falkland, Lord, 361 Fall (of man), 41, 47, 78, 80, 297 fancy, 454; and agreement, 435, 450, 456 fantasy(ies), 96, 451-52, 454, 456-59, 461, 464-67, 470-72, 474-75, 484, 490-91, 496, 522, 533 f a n t a i s i e s , 489; F a n t a s i a , 96-98, 180, 307, 453, 488 fashion(s), 430 fate, 42, 77 federal: constitution, 527; government, 528; representative structure, 530; republic, 526; structure, 521, 523 Federalism, 525; Catonian, 530; Madi­ sonian, 528, 531, 533; nonclassical, 530

611

Federalists, the, 520, 525, 532, 541 , T h e , 522 Federalist: party, 528, 531; Republican debate with, 513, 529; theory, 517, 525-26; thought, 518, 522-24; tradi­ tion, 523 fee-simple empire, 534, 539, 541, 542 Ferdinand of Aragon, 160 Ferguson, Adam, 449-501, 503; E s s a y o n t h e H i s t o r y o f C i v i l S o c i e t y , 499-501 Ferguson, Arthur B. ( T h e A r t i c u l a t e

Federalist

Citizen a n d

the English

Renaissance

),

339-40 feudal: aristocracy, 388, 414, 415; bar­ onage, 414; ethos, 133; interpretation of history, 404, 406; lords, 164; monarchy, 388; past, 357; period, 417; power, 416, 419; scholarship, 418, 421 ( a n d s e e tenure) feudalism, 385-86, 417, 421; bastard, 366, 408; f e u d u m , , 386 few: as Aristotelian category, 69, 70, 73; in Bruni, 89; in Burke, 519-20; in English constitutional theory, 354, 514; in Giannotti, 286-89, 297-99, 310-12, 315; in Guicciardini’s d i s c o r s i , 130, 132-34, 139-41, 144-45.203; in his D i a l o g o , 221, 227-28, 230-34, 237-38, 240, 249, 252-53, 255-56, 261, 263, 485; in Harrington, 387, 394, 414; in Machiavelli, 2 11; in Madison, 520; in Montesquieu, 490; the o t t i m a t i and, 101-2, 148; representatives as, 517, 519; in republican theory, 85, 284, 349, 480, 515 Ficino, Marsilio, 221, 222n fiction, 490 Fielding, Henry, 447, 478; T o m J o n e s , 447 Fifth Monarchists, 395, 398 Fifth Monarchy, the, 511-13, 542 Filmer, Sir Robert, 367, 376, 417, 421 finance, 426, 437, 447, 451, 460, 474, 478 financial: revolution, 425, 479, 546; structure, 412 financier, 445, 447 Fletcher, Andrew, 426-32, 435-37, 442, 446-47, 492, 500, 530; D i s c o u r s e o f G o v e r n m e n t w i t h R e l a t i o n to Militias,

428-32;

Discourses

of Scotland

, 431

o n

the Affairs

IN D E X Florence: Alamanni on, 152-54; apoca­ lyptic vision of, 44; Cavalcanti on, 453; in Dante, 50; in Dati, 92; in events of 1494 and after, 104-5, 266; 1512 and after, 138-39; founda­ tion myth, 52; Giannotti on, 273, 274, 278, 280, 283, 285-86, 289, 291-93, 300-303, 305-7, 309, 313, 317-19; G rea t Siege (1528-30), 266-67, 273-74, 286, 289, 302, 305; Guicciar­ dini on, 125-27, 139-40, 142, 149-50, 219-20, 224, 225, 227, 232, 233, 240-42, 248, 250-52, 258; guilds of, 199-200; Machiavelli and, 157, 160, 186-87, 205n, 213, 216, 273, 327; Medicean, 64; as republic, 84, 87, 349, 482; Salutati and Bruni, 62; Savonarola and, 104-7, 109-10, 112-14, 215, 344’, Paolo Vettori and, 147 Florentine (s), 365, 495; character, 109; citizens, 83; civility, 80; government, 263; history, 107, 263, 395; humanists, 56, 63; institutions, 83; nature, 257; political thought, 316, 381; politics, 221; republicans, 437; tradition, 356-57 ( a n d s e e republic) institutions: Consiglio Grande, 103, 105, h i , 117-20, 122; Alamanni on, 152, 156; Giannotti on, 278-79, 281, 283, 287, 289, 291-92, 295, 303-5, 31215; Guicciardini on, 127-29, 134, 14344, 146-48, 151, 221, 226-27, 233, 237, 240-41, 253-56, 258-62, 263-65 constitution: of 1494, 103, 105, 112, 117-20, 128, 130, 145, 185, 233-34, 240, 256-57, 265, 278, 303-4, 315; of 1527, 303-4, 306, 315; g o n f a l o n i e r e (ate), 103, 117, 121-22, 131-32, 241, 257, 260, 287, 304, 311, 313, 315; p r o c u r a t o r i , 289, 312; Signoria, 103, 117, 119, 257, 287; Ten of W ar, 257, 259, 273, 287, 289-90, 304-5 ( a n d s e e C o l l e g i o , senate) form: as end of p h y s i s , 5; the frontier and, 539-40; Giannotti and, 275-76, 296; grace and virtue impose upon matter and fortune, 76, 80, 161, 178, 183-85; Guicciardini does not men­ tion, 136, 140, 219, 230; history lack­ ing in, 42; legislation and, 254-55; lost through the Fall, 8; Machiavelli

and, 157; his legislators find o c c a ­ for, 168-70, 174, 181; in his theory of corruption, 207-8; people lack in American thought, 517; p o l i s and p o l i t e u m a , 78; republic as, 85, 328, 414; in radical apocalyptic, 37374; in Savonarola, 107, no, 111, 136 Forms, the Platonic, 20-21 f o r m a , 108, i2 3n, i68n, 207-8, 27475, 3° 9n Fortescue, Sir John, 9-12, 17-22, 24, 29, 56, 115, 159, 334, 338, 357, 404 f o r t u n a , 77, 78, 218, 486; and commerce, 5°3, 533; and corruption, 2 11-13, 402, 405; and Credit, 453-54; in English thought, 350, 366, 374, 387; in Gian­ notti, 297, 298n, 300-303, 317-19, 328; in Guicciardini, 230, 262n, 263, 265^ 268-70, 27m; in 11 P r i n c i p e , 156-63, 172-81; meaning of, 36-41; and v i r t u , virtue, v i r t u s y 84-88, 94-97, 108, 136, 166-69, 173, i84, 185, 188-91, 193, 194, 203, 206, 460, 472, 525; F o r t u n a (fig.), 168 fortune, 3, 36, 44, 47, 76, 197-99, 237, 238, 247, 294n, 328, 333, 445, 473; and commerce, 493; and corruption, viii; custom and grace, viii, 401; in English thought, 349-51, 363, 365-66, 370-71, 374-75; and faith, 48; and fantasy, 533; in Guicciardini, 264-65; and in­ novation, 160-63, 165, 179, 180; and power, 114, 134-37; r° l e ° f, ix ‘» an 263, 293; grace, 41-42; incarnation, 45; in Jefferson, 532, 541; and king’s authority, 30, 335, 351, 353; knowledge of, 41, 208; law, 375; and Leviathan, 397-99; and Moses, 170-72, 175; persons of Trinity, 45, 396; prophecy, 34, 43-44, 6in, 190, 370; providence, 28-29, 39» 378; and radical action, 373-74; redemp­ tion, 34; and republic, 213-15, 323-24, 368, 385; the republic his kingdom, 385, 396, 398, 400n; universals, 21; utopia, 403 godly princes, 342, 345 Godly Rule, 403 gold, 455, 475; and paper, 441, 444, 449, 451-52, 456, 474-75, 496; and silver, 435* 444, 45°> 496 good: the (category of citizens), 69; corruption of, 71; despotism of, 71

6 i3

INDEX

good ( c o n t .) (with meaning of value) of all, 94; common, 68, 74-76, 91, 107, 200203, 226, 238, 249-50, 294, 299, 358, 387, 464, 473, 483, 486, 487, 519, 520, 522, 523; general, 68, 136, 472; limited, 200; particular, 32, 67, 68, 71, 74, 75, 80, 201, 431, 472, 495, 501; political, 202, 425; private, 445, 472, 501, 526; public, 88, 128, 132-36, 202-4, 209> 2I3> 228-29, 249> 259> 2g5> 293» 323~34. 329> 36711, 43*> 440. 445-447J-72>485, 495, 501, 526; pursuit of, 67, 71, 72, 235; of republic, 491; social, 202; uni­ versal, 67; of the whole, 71 goods (with meaning of commodi­ ties): circulation of, 445, 502; ex­ change of, 451, 492, 502; false, 471; of fortune, 375, 387; multiplication of, 501; production of, 498, 501; property in, 391; real, 456, 459, 464 good old cause, the, 384, 422, 528 Gordon, Thomas, 427, 467-68, 470, 476, 507; works ( s e e Trenchard) Goths, the, 388 Gothic: balance, 388, 393; barbarism, 431; constitution, 434; empire, 539; freedom, 512; government, 416, 428, 433, 493-94; instability, 416; mon­ archy, 387; society, 470, 482; virtue, 441, 513; warrior, 430, 493, 5 11; world and epoch, 432, 435 g o v e r n o , 118, 306; b u o n , 305, 307^ c i v i l e , io8n, 109; d i d r e n t o , 125; l a r g o , 117-19, 185, 202, 213, 239^ 395; m i s t o (s e e mixed government) ; e r e g g i m e n t o , 108, i n ; s t r e t t o , 118, 120, 122, 148, 233, 244, 253, 395 government: aristocratic, 253; Augustan theory of, 458-60, 472, 479, 487, 489; balanced, viii, 355, 377, 408, 433, 512; change in, 129, 131, 221; and common good, 327; corruptive, 409, 469, 507; d e f a c t o and d e j u r e , 377-78; despotic, 71; elitist, 249; English, 340-41, 35455; expanding role of, 425; Federalist ideas of, 521, 523-25, 526-31, 534; Ferguson on, 503; four powers of, 283-84, 304-7, 309, 3 11, 315-16 ( a n d s e e functions); general and par­ ticular, 141, 223; good and bad, 72,

221-23, 229; Harrington on, 387, 390, 407, 449; historical growth in, 429, 434-39, 466-67; Hume on, 494-95, 497 ideal, 197, 234, 241, 251, 279, 296, 325; Jefferson on, 533, 541; and legis­ lation, 339; Machiavelli’s classification, 158; manipulative, 127, 229, 235; medieval, 27; mixed (s e e mixed); modern, 329-30, 509; modern Ameri­ can, 543, 548; oligarchic, 227; popular, 122, 127, 146, 211, 239, 243-45, 248, 250, 253, 262, 274, 289, 295, 307; a problem in, 323; Pym and W ent­ worth on, 358-60; reform of, 346; representative and republican, 517-19; self-government, 146; separation of powers in, 480-82, 517; three estates, 404; three forms, 225, 241, 296, 308, 362; tyrannical, 230; Venetian, 119; Walpolean, 474 Gracchi, Caius and Tiberius, 195, 204, 206, 211, 310, 388, 533 grace: and apocalyptic, 43, 50, 106, 136, 270, 396, 5 11-12, 532, 541-42; and Aristotelian reason, 67, 74; de­ cline in English political thought, 403; the king’s, 28, 363; kingdom of, and republic, 80, 85, 99, 108, n o -n ; and Machiavelli’s Moses, 170, 190; Machiavelli separates republic from, 213-15, 217-18, 400; and Puritan calling, 374; and recovery of form, 7, 42, 107, no, 136-37, 208; and re­ demption, 41, 42-43, 366; and secular time, vii, 48, i n , 113, 320, 349, 401; and stability, 180; and Venice, 325; and virtue, 91, 112-13, 114, 466 g r a z i a , 108, 135 and n, 136, 170, 172, 208, 263, 264, 293n grandi, 298, 300-302, 307-9, 311-12 g r a n d e z z a , 311-12 Great Anarch (Pope’s), 457 Greek(s), 73, 116, 501, 511 Greville, Fulke, Lord Brooke, 352, 353; T r e a t i s e o f M o n a r c h y , 352 Greville, Robert, Lord Brooke, 371 g u a r d i a d e l l a l i b e r t a , 196-97, 366, 472 g u b e r n a c u l u m , 25-29, 50, 159, 335 Guicciardini, Francesco: as jurist, 83; optimate historian, 121; papal gover­

614

IN D E X nor, 139-40, 186; and Siege of Flor­ ence, 226-27; in Spain, 122; works: Considerazioni intorno Machiavelli

, 194, 268;

Firenze

d o p o

Medici

, 140-47;

rare

lo stato

i49n, 15 1;

ai D i s c o r s i d e l Del

Del

m o d o

a li a c a s a

Del m o d o

de

de

di

’

di assicu-

’

Medici

,

d i e l e g g e r e gli

uffici n e l c o n s i g l i o g r a n d e Dialogo

governo

la r e s t a u r a z i o n e

del r e g g i m e n t o

, 130, 134-35;

di F i r e n z e ,

186, 219-66, 268-69, 286-87, 318; d i L o g r o g n o , 122, 124, 126, 130-31, 134-40, 145, 153, 183, 220, 232, 233, 254-55; R i c o r d i , 2i6n, 220, 242, 266-70 other references: analyst of Medici rule, 160; on aristocracy, 395; com­ pared with Giannotti, 278, 283, 286, 289, 296, 308, 310, 313, 317-18; on corruption, 407, 548; critic of Machia­ velli, 194-96; on faith and madness, 294; on the few and many, 480, 485; on government, 460; on g r a z i a , 170; and Orti Oricellari, 295; as peer of Machiavelli, vii, 86, 117, 328-29, 334, 495; use of p a r t i c i p a z i o n e , 184; of p a r t i c u l a r i , 209; and second nature of Florentines, 165, 185; use of s t a t o , 175; on Venice, 285, 289 Guicciardini, Piero, 220-22, 224n, 24546, 258 gunpowder, 429-30 Discorso

Hale, Sir Matthew, 9, 404-5 Haller, William, 343 Hamilton, Alexander, 462, 488, 528-33, 541, 543, 547-48 Hammond, Henry, 397 Hanson, Donald, F r o m K i n g d o m t o C o m m o n w e a l t h , 27n, 335-36, 338 Harley, Robert, 449 Harrington, James: and C a t o ' s L e t t e r s , 469; in civic humanist succession in England, viii, 386, 389, 402, 436, 446, 450, 454, 484; on colonies, 139, 514; and Davenant, 438, 442; and Defoe, 433; and Fletcher, 428-29; on feudal monarchy, 473; and France, 413; and Giannotti, 272, 300, 302-3; and Hobbes, 396-98, 401; and House of Lords, 404, 409, 414, 415; and Hume,

493; and land, 412, 485; on legislators and grace, i7on; and Machiavelli, 317, 390; on medieval government, 26-27; and Montesquieu, 480-81; on natural aristocracy, 515; and neoHarringtonians, 406, 416-17, 419-20; and Neville, 417-18, 420; O c e a n a , 38396, 399-4° ° , 41 1 , 4*5, 4*7, 442, 475, 510, 535; on ordination, 397; on property, 387, 390; on republican eschatology, 385, 398-99, 476; on ro­ tation, 382, 394, 407, 519; on standing armies, 4 11-12; and Toland, 449; on Venetian ballot, 285; and Webster, 534-35; and W hig culture, 507-8 Harringtonian: constitutions, 514; doc­ trine, 406, 419; interpretation, 419; liberty, 418 ( a ; i d s e e neo-Harringtonian) Harrison, William H., 538 Harvey, William, 394 Hartz, Louis B., 509 heaveh, 368; appeal to, 371 Hegel, G.W .F., 549 Hegelians, 549-50 Hengham, Chief Justice, 27, 28 Hellenic, intellect, 6 Henry VII, King, 387-88 ( a n d s e e Bacon) Henry VIII, 342, 429 Henry, Patrick, 426, 531 hereditary: aristocracy, 524; monarchy, 163, 184, 191; nobility, 73; peerage, 404; prince, 161-62; principality, 176; ruler, 198 Hermes de Caduceo, 393^ 407 Hervey, Lord, 427, 482; A n c i e n t a n d M o d e r n

Liberty

Stated

and

C o m ­

, 482 Hexter, J. H., 175, 211 hierarchy, 49, 50, 53, 56, 62, 66, 339, 343, 349-51, 358, 485 hierarchical order, 334 Hill, Christopher, 336 historic: memory, 276; monarchy, 404; past, 466 historical: causation, 300-302; change, 402, 467; existence, 401; process, 431, 498; science, 498; self-image, 334; self-understanding, 333, 402 { a n d s e e contradiction)

6j5

pared

IN D E X historicism, 3, 551; historicity, 551 historiography, 33, 46 history: action in, 552; alienation from, 466; change as, 78, 328; civil, 330; classical, 373, 537; commerce in, 499, 501; conjectural, 498; Country view of, 486-87; Court view, 459, 525; Crocean, 242; cyclical, 218, 493, 540, 543; and eschatology, 33-34, 43, 45; and the Fall, 297; and fantasia, 96-97; and fortuna, 39, 97; feudal interpreta­ tion, 421; Giannotti on, 277, 281, 327; and grace, 7, 136, 396, 5 11; Guicciar­ dini on, 220, 224-25, 242, 250; Har­ rington on, 388-89; Harringtonian and neo-Harringtonian, 449-50, 481; and historicism, 551; Hobbes and, 370; Hume and, 497; imperialist, 53; Machiavelli and, 268-69; modern sense of, 46, 480; nature and, 537, 546; ordering of, 95; as particular happenings, 3; personality and, 402; and philosophy, 63; political, 36, 43; and political man, 506; and pope as Antichrist, 343; premodern view of, 46, 551; of production, 498-99; pro­ phetic, 43, 44; public, 43; quarrel with, 545; republic and, 80, 184-85, 218, 327-28, 493, 543, 551; republican revaluation of, 54, 57, 58, 60, 83, 84, 327; sacred, 31, 32, 44, 207, 343, 345, 512; as saeculum, 3 2 scholastic, 5-6; as scheme of devel­ opment, 498-99; secular, 8, 32-34, 36, 42, 44, 47, 344; spiritual, 106, 107; terror of, 116; transformation of, 550; V ico on, 65, 498; virtue and, 402; and westward course, 511 (and see America, contradiction, English, Europe, Florentine, Scotland, value, Venetian) Hobbes, Thomas, 324, 370-72, 378, 380, 382, 385, 396-400, 401, 417, 457, 474-75, 518; Leviathan, 324, 335, 370, 380, 389, 396-99, 474-75 Hobbesian language, 471; state of nature, 440 Hobson-Lenin theory, 530 Holland, 391, 412, 424, 438 homo credens, creditor, 550; faber, 498, 550; mercator, 550; politicus, 550 (and

see political, zdon)\ religiosus, 462; rhetor, 550 honor, 123, 133, 134, 137, 141, 145, 153, 219, 249-50, 259, 286, 289-90, 452, 455, 465; false, 471, 474-75 (and see onore) House of Commons, 340, 348, 361, 363, 377, 406, 4 11, 418, 427, 433-34, 442, 478-79, 514; antiquity of, 417, 421 House of Lords, 363-64, 377, 389^ 404, 406, 413, 414, 416, 419, 514 House, the Other, 384, 409, 413, 514; houses, upper and lower, 354, 418 household, 68, 203 (and see oikos) hubris, 78 human progress and capacity, 502 humanism, 51, 87; constitutional, 527; English, 338-40; English legal, 341; Florentine, 63; Machiavellian, 347; philological and political, 61; politi­ cal, 340; Renaissance, 453, 545; re­ publican, 402, 529 (and see civic) humanist(s), 54, 58, 59, 62, 67, 75, 87, 338-39; Christian, 76; civic, vii, 66, 75, 402; commonwealth, 348; experiment, 500; Florentine, 56, 63; Italian, 74; knowledge, 93; philosophy, 63; po­ litical theory, 349; political thought, 316; Renaissance, 437; republic, 84; scholarship, 51; succession, 505; thought, 59; tradition, 329 Humble Petition and A dvice, the, 384, 409, 481 Hume, David, 27, 423, 427, 472, 493-98, 504, 508-9 humors, 355 (and see umori) hunter (shepherd, farmer, trader), 498, 540 Hunton, Philip, 366-69, 374; A Treatise of Monarchy, 366

616

Ibn Khaldun, 499 idealism, 548; idealist mode of discourse, 505; theory of war, 536 (and see Forms, Plato) ideology, io j , 156, 338, 340-41, 348, 38l, 432, 46O-6I, 466, 478, 486-88, 5O7, 55° imagination, 454, 456-57, 459-60, 464, 487, 496, 498 immorality, 92, 93 imperator(es), 211, 510, 529

INDEX

imperium, 510 impersonality, in government, 227, 255, 284-85 increase (see expansion) independence, 210, 407-9, 414, 417, 420, 447, 450, 458, 469, 480, 482, 486, 499, 508-9, 514; independent individual(s), 44i, 5*9 Independents, 396, 476 individual: in apocalyptic, 337, 374-75; in breakdown of government, 367-71, 379-80; the Burkean, 24; as citizen, u 4, 335, 523, 521\ in commercial society, 436, 460-61, 464-66, 502; in descending authority, 334-35; the English, 370; and fantasia, 96; in Fer­ guson, 499; Fortescue’s, 56; and grace, 42-43; in Harrington, 389-91, 394, 519; in Ireton, 376; in jurisdictional society, 335; in liberal theory, 523; and liberty, 127, 227, 232; loss of significance, 538; other-directed, 548; as philosopher or citizen, 99; the political, 330; in political arithmetic, 425; in politics, 329; the Puritan, 336; the republic’s demands on, 551; and rotation, 257; the ruling, 78; salvation of, 35; secular consciousness, 338; and separation of powers, 128; in time, 276; and universality, 89; virtu of, 167, 244; virtue in, 156, 329, 441, 458, 466, 497, 526, 538; as zdon poli­ tikon, 460, 501 induction, 10, 11, 21, 22 industria, 147, 244 industrial labor, 550 industry, 362, 429, 443, 539-40 inequality, 208-10, 469, 473, 534 influence, political, 406, 419, 473, 479-82, 494-95, 525, 528-29, 548 inheritance, 175, 176, 359, 376, 389-91, 405, 445, 451, 463 innovation, 25, 113, 144, 149, 154, 156-57’ 1 59-fi4, '67, 169-72, 174-78, l80, 184, l88, I94, I98, 203, 219, 279,

280, 329, 337, 353, 430, 457, 460 innovazione (i) , 266, 273, 28 m, 295,

318

innovator(s), 149, 156-58, 160-62, 164-65, 167, 169-77, l %°> ^ 5 , 191, 203, 238 Inns of Court, 340 617

instability, 78, 79, 302, 317, 327, 328, 4*9, 453, 466 intellect: aristocratic, 266; Aristotelian, 5, 21, 68, 69, 72; Christian, 6; civic humanist, 467; and faith, 7, 41, 43; feeds on goods and experience, 498; Florentine, 208; and Forms, 20; Greek and Roman, 31; Hellenic, 6; historical, 54; and historical existence, 401; the legislative, 534; of the many, 255; medieval, 4; patristic, 32; in Pico, 98-99; and popular energy, 536; Renaissance, 4; and rhetoric, 58; and society, 9; twentieth-century, 543; and universals, 4, 63; il ben delP intelletto, 39 intelligence: angelic, 21; in the citta disarmata, 240; civic, 32; divine, 39; and experience, 17; fallen, 7; and fortune, 37; the legislator’s, 283, 369; the many’s, 262, 284; mobilized by republic, 91, 94; non-philosophical, 17; and the particular, 237; perfection of the political, 327; the philosopherruler’s, 20, 21; the polis and, 300; in ragione di stato, 356; in the Ricordi, 267; in subject and prince, 334-35; superhuman, 123; time-bound, 7, 30; Venetian, 322; and virtue, 354 intelligenza, 135, 253, 260, 408 interdependence, 313 interest(s), 125, 355, 390, 464, 474, 483, 487, 495, 521, 523-25, 53o-3i, 535, 539; landed, 434, 446-47, 461; lending upon, 391; monied, 446-48, 461, 468-69, 479, 507, 510, 525, 529; per­ manent, 376, 407; private, 439, 495; self, 464, 465, 467 (and see particular) invention, invenzione, 280, 288 investment, 425, 440, 457, 530 (and see society) investor, 425 Ireland, 392, 442 Ireton, Henry, 375-77, 385, 389-90, 433 isonomia, 89, 473, 516, 537 Israel, 44, 104, 168, 172, 391, 399; Israelites, 171; new Israel, 343 Italian: history, 107; humanists, 74; thought, 59 Italy (Italia), 86, 116, 117, 142, 157, 163, 180, 181, i88n, 215, 216, 245, 277

INDEX

Jackson, Andrew, 535-38; myth of, 536 James I, 17, 29, 354 James II, 423-24 jealousy, 352 Jefferson, Thomas, 211, 462, 529, 532-33,

493, 498-99, 508, 53i, 534-35, 539-41, 549; landed: commonwealth, 468; interest, 488; man, 445 landowner, 469 Landucci, Luca, 114-15 language: Alamanni’s, 153; of the 535-36, 538, 540-43, 547; Notes on Virginia, 532-33^ 538 Answer to the Nineteen Propositions, Jeffersonians, the, 528-29, 532 362-64; of apocalypse, 104-6; Aristo­ jeremiad (s), 427, 512-13, 543-45, 549 telian, 73; Arm y manifestoes, 372-74; Jeremiah, 136 Berkeley’s, 5 11; Boethius’s, 38; Bo­ Jethro, 399 lingbroke’s, 479-80; British and Ameri­ Jews, the, 391 can diverge, 547; in Cato's Letters, Joachim of Fiore, 45, 51 471-72; changes in after 1660, 402-5; Joachite Spirituals, 346 after 1688, 423, 425; of citizenship, Johnson, Dr., 409 83-84; the classical adopted in Eng­ Joshua, 207 land, 354, 372, 401; and conversa­ Judas, 50, 53 tion, 64; Contarini’s, 325; Davenant judiciary, 517, 521 on, 441; Defoe’s, 433-34; his debt to Julius II, Pope, 138 Machiavelli’s, 454, 460; of Florentine jure divino (authority), 382, 476 politics, 102; Guicciardini’s, 125, 135, jurisdictio, 25-29, 159, 335 140; Harrington’s, 394; and history, jurisdiction(s), 28, 335, 340, 344, 480 61; Hume’s, 496; Jefferson’s, 532; jus conquestus, 368, 380, 383, 389; Leveller, 381; Machiavelli’s, 169, 170, gentium, 380, 383; gladii, 368 207; Machiavelli on, 163, 2i7n; and magic, 98; the persistence of classical justice, 75, 78, 85, 108, no, 250, 335, in America, 506-7, 514, 516, 519, 544356, 499. 5 ‘ 4. 53°. 552i natural, 17; giustizia, 213 45, 548; of prophecy, 33, 45; Pym ’s, Justinian, 50 358; of rhetoric, 59; Savonarola’s, 108, 112, 135; Shaftesbury’s, 415; of the unique, 25; of virtue and corrup­ Kentucky, the Hunters of, 536 tion, viii king(s), the, 12, 29, 30, 103, 189, 302, Laslett, Peter, 424 334, 348, 352-53, 4J5, 4'8, 43°, 432, latitudinarians, 403 475, 518; the English, 329, 355-60, law (s), 19, 20, 29, 65, 87, 323-25, 334, 36I-65, 371, 38l, 386, 388-89, 4IO-II, 413, 419, 468, 514; the feudal, 387-88, 341, 344, 346, 353, 355, 3 48 i» 49*> 531* T h e E x a m i n e r , 452, 454; S e n t i m e n t s o f a C h u r c h o f E n g l a n d M a n , 476; D i s ­ course

of the

. . .

Nobles

and

the

, 481 sword, the, 171-72, 175, 201, 210, 368, 375, 378-80, 382, 385-86, 389, 392, 428-29, 433, 442, 470 moment of ( s e e moment) C o m m o n s

Tacitism, 351, 422 Tacitean prince, 351 T a o T e C h i n g , 191 Tarquin(s), 195, 310 tax(es), taxation, 410, 430; direct, 412; land, 426, 442 Taylor, John, of Caroline, 526, 532 temporization, 268 tenants, 450; dependent, 447; military, 388 tenure, 335, 390, 419; dependent, 386; feudal, 386, 411, 429, 481 ( a n d s e e freehold) t e r r a f i r m a , 321, 392, 442 terror, 538, 548 theocracy, 111, 397-99 Theseus, 168, 175, 180 Third Age, 46, 51, 80; of Joachim, 111 Thucydides, 94 time: accidental, 199; in America, 54143; and angels, 22; apocalyptic, 43-45, !4* 337* 343* 374* 39^-97** and Aris­ totle, 21, 61, 75; and Augustine, 41; and Berkeley, 5 11; and Boethius, 40; in C a t o ' s L e t t e r s , 472; custom and grace, 208, 349; and Dante, 50; and Davenant, 443; dimension of, 3-5; in Engagement controversy, 379; and fortune, 38, 80, 178, 184, 370, 486; and Giannotti, 276-77, 314, 318-20; God and, 7, 8, 31, 34-35, 40; and Greville, 352, 354; and Guicciardini, 124, 221, 227, 237-38, 267-68; in Har­ rington and Hobbes, 395, 399-400, 433; and humanism, 51, 61, 339 immemorial, 376; and inheritance, 463; and Machiavelli, 156, 161, 165-66, 177-78, 180, 184, 188-90, 193, 268; organization of, 27, 114, 183, 504; politics of, 274; and prudence, 24-25, 30; and Pym, 358; in republican

630

INDEX

theory, viii, 3, 48, 53, 55, 60, 75-78, 83-85, 106, 112, Il6, 185, 215, 217, 328-29, 5OO-5OI, 527, 54I, 549, 551; river the image of, 363; and Savona­ rola, 107, h i ; and Scottish school, 503; and second nature, 208; secular, vii, 8, 527, 551; social, 462 t e m p o , 266, 267n times, 266, 352; time-process, 205-6; time-sequence, 416 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 537-38, 541, 543 Toland, John, 403, 426, 432, 435, 437, 442, 448, 476, 483; T h e M i l i t i a R e ­ f o r m e d , 432 T ory, Tories, 420-21, 426, 442, 446-49, 452, 477-78, 483, 529 trade, 391, 425-26, 430, 432-34, 43^-39, 441-50, 464, 469-70, 484-85, 508, 530-31; free, 531; trader, the, 445-46 trading: companies, 468-70, 473; interest, 488; man, 431; nation, 424, 440, 442 ; society, 425, 464, 469-70 tradition(s), 12, 49, 59, 85, no, 158, 159, 163, 166, 178, 179, 185, 212, 251, 389, 395, 405, 424, 533; Aristotelian and humanist, 329; Aristotelian republi­ can, 273; Athenian, 64; civic humanist, 321; classical, 506, 521; Florentine republican, 272; idealist, 550; Jeffersonian-Jacksonian, 539; Renaissance, 513; republican, 317, 507, 514, 526; socialist, 550; philo-Venetian, 480; Whig, 547 traditional society, 49, 164, 338, 341 t r a n s l a t i o , 513; i m p e r i i , 5 11, 540; s t u d i i ,

511

Trapezuntios, Giorgios, 100, io2n t r e c e n t o , 54, 55 Trenchard, John, 426-27, 432-37, 442, 467-68, 470, 473-74, 476, 507; C a t o ' s L e t t e r s , 427, 467-77, 481, 515, 528; T h e I n d e p e n d e n t W h i g , 427, 467 tribunes, the tribunate, Roman, 195, 246, 308 Trifone Gabriello, 276-77, 279, 289 Trojan (s), 50 Tudor (s), 302 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 544 Tuscany, 55, 210, 216; Grand Duchy of, *54

Tuveson, Ernest, 403, 477, 511-12, 532, 541, 550 t y c h e , 31, 36, 77 type(s), 33, 51,37 3, 378,399 tyranny, 52, 54, 72, 77, 91, 108, 195, 200-201, 216, 229, 230, 235, 264, 362, 433, 438, 456, 489, 509 tyrannicide, 343 tyrant, 66, 157, 231, 294, 352, 4 11, 453, 537; “strong tyrant,” 353 Tyrrell, William, 421; P a t r i a r c h a n o n M o n a r c h a , 421 Ullman, Walter, 29, 334 , 24m, 245, 251, 298-99, 307 (a n d s e e humors) universal(s), 4-5, 8, n , 14, 18, 20, 22, 28, 29, 33, 39, 44, 56, 58, 61-66, 68, 71, 75, 76, 116, 156, 275, 493; church, 342; concepts, 219; form, 79; good, 3, 67, 68, 74, 115 ; monarchy, 437; prin­ ciples, 305, 375; values, 3, 333 u n i v e r s a l e , 143-46, 207, 224, 275 u n i v e r s i t a s , 156 universality, 106 university (ies), 340 Urbino, 64, 139, 149, 150, 153, 350 usage(s), 3, 12, 14, 16, 23, 47, 85, 109, i n , 129, *53, ‘ 54, >59, '1, 24', 283, 3 >7, 34i, 347, 4J, 498 usage, presumption, and prescription, 404 u s a n z e , 283n use, 17, 85, no, 123, 144, 158, 175, 176, 178, 180, 208, 212, 251, 290, 333, 385, 389,405 usury, 391 utopia, 403, 470, 477, 493, 511-12, 540-43, 551

umori

Valla, Lorenzo, 60, 61 value (s), ix, 73, 74, 154, 266, 402, 459, 462, 466-67, 474, 486-87, 494, 496, 498, 501-2; civic and Christian, 492, 505; exchange, 435; goals, 69; and history, 243, 252, 266, 402, 458, 462, 466-67, 486-87, 498, 508, 549, 552; particular, 75, 76, 464; priorities, 69; private, 491; secondary, 501-2; universal, 501 Vane, Sir Henry, 384, 389, 395, 398, 414; T h e H e a l i n g Q u e s t i o n , 384

631

IN D E X v iri l i t a , 231 Varese, Claudio, 91 vassal, vassalage, 386-87, 390, 4 11, 418, v i r t u , 86, 405, 429, 463, 476, 479, 487, 490, 493, 500-501, 523-24, 530, 532, 428-29, 432-33, 468, 470, 483, 493-94, 546 542, 552; aristocratic, 243; and Caval­ v a r i a z i o n e , 282 canti, 93, 98; civic, 181, 244, 249, 251venality, 407, 532, 548 52, 277; d e l l a m i l i z i a , 318m, d e l l e a r m e , Venice, 55, 64, 116, 327, 366, 474; con­ 240m, dynamic, 488; and j o r t u n a , 87, stitution of, 101, 148; Contarini on, 136, 366, 374, 460; in Giannotti, 273, 320-27; Davenant and, 442; and Flor­ 281, 288, 290, 29m, 296-97, 299-300, entine politics after 1494, 117-20; 305, 307-8, 313, 316, 323, 327; in Fortescue on, 14, 16, 334; Giannotti Guicciardini, i32n, 133, 230, 232-35, on, 272-86, 289, 292, 295, 304, 310-11, 237-41, 243-45, 247-55, 257-64, 266, 313, 314, 317, 319, 328; Guicciardini 269-71, 317; Jacksonian, 535-40; in on, 234, 241, 256-58, 260-63, 265, 271; Machiavelli, 157-59, 161, 162, 166-81, Harrington on, 285, 391-94, 442, 535; 184-85, 188-90, 19m, 193, 194, 197-99, Lewkenor on, 321, 324-25; Machiavelli 201-3, 207, 211-13, 217, 269, 271, 295, on, 189, 197-98, 210, 292, 438; myth 306, 319, 333, 337, 366, 374; 406, 444; in Machiavellian sense, viii, 92, 99, of (m i t o d i V e n e z i a ), 100-102, 112-13, 366, 435, 442, 445, 472, 499, 510, 525, 255, 262, 271, 284-85, 317, 319-20, 324529; m i l i t a r e , 181, i95n, 213; military, 25, 327-28, 333, 393; Nedham and, 181, 201-2, 247-48, 300; republican, 382; in the Orti Oricellari, 124, 154, 306; Venetian, 284-85, 321 186, 295; and the o t t i m a t i , 101, 103, virtue: active, 76, 317, 350, 397, 472, 119-20; and Sarpi, 327-28; and Savona­ 524; agrarian, 533, 540; American, rola, 104-6, 112; site of, 275 507-9, 511, 513, 515-25, 526-44, 545, Venetian: aristocracy, 322, 393; ballot, 547; ancient, 51; in A n s w e r t o N i n e ­ 288; Consiglio Maggiore, 100, 103, t e e n P r o p o s i t i o n s , 362-65; antithesis 117-19; known as Grande, 277-85, of commerce, ix, 427, 431, 495, 549, 324; Doge, 100, 101, 256, 258, 261, 551; of corruption, viii, 387; of for­ 263, 277, 281, 283; dogeship, 112, 121, tune, viii, 40, 85, 185, 191, 349, 371, 280; elective procedure, 261, 278, 385; Aristotelian republic a structure 284-86, 304, 319, 393; example, 218; of, 73-76, 115-16, 120, 123, 157, 168, history, 277, 279-81, 283, 319-20, 322, 184-85, 189, 192, 208, 334, 349, 354, 327; image, 271; laws, 14-16; law of 364, 402, 550-51; and arms, 386; in 1170, 279-80; law of 1297, 278-79, Boethius, 36; in Bolingbroke, 482281-83; mechanization of virtue, 262, 85; British, 513; in Bruni, 87-90; in 284-85, 288, 295, 322, 393; model, 108, C a t o ' s L e t t e r s , 469-74; in Cavalcanti, 185, 254, 272, 295, 317; paradigm, 260, 92-95, 97-98; and change, 458-59; 333; pattern, 242, 265; Quarantie, Christian, 75, 76, 92, 133, 441; com­ 314; system, 259, 285 (a n d s e e Colle­ munity of, 408; in Contarini, 321-25; gio, g e n t i l u o m i n i , senate) the counselor’s, 339 Venturi, Franco, 476 Country conception of, 407-9, 414, v e r t u , 501; c h r e t i e n n e , 491; m o r a l e , 491; 426-27, 432, 447, 450, 462-67, 478'79, p o l i t i q u e , 491-93 486-88; in Court ideology, 487; and Vettori, Francesco, 62 Credit, 456-58; in Dati, 91-92; in Vettori, Paolo, 147-49, 151, 154, 160, 176 Davenant, 437-38, 443; in Defoe, 434; Vettori, Piero, 293n decline of, 5 13 ^ 521, 537; empire Vico, Giambattista, 65, 498 and republic, 88-89, 215-17; v i g i l a n z i a , 239, 244, 252 expansion of, 539; and false Virgil, 39, 61 consciousness, 475; in Ferguson, Virginia, 515; University of, 533

632

IN D E X w ar(s): civil, its impact on the indi­ vidual, 366, 369; Clausewitz’s theory of, 536; in Country thought, 458, 460, 466, 478, 487; in Davenant, 437-38, 440-45; in Defoe, 434, 453-54; in Fer­ guson, 499-500; in Guicciardini, 239; in Hamilton, 531; the Jacksonian myth of, 536; justice and, 552; land and sea, 442-43; in Machiavelli, 199201, 213, 218, 269, 392, 487; in Swift, 447-48; and W hig government fi­ nance, 425-27, 450, 488, 525, 529 of 1812, 535; of Independence, 516; the Nine Years W ar, 437; the “ paper war,” 426-27, 437, 467; of Religion, 340; Revolutionary and Napoleonic, 547; Spanish Succession, 437 ( a n d s e e England: Civil W ar) Ward, John William, 536-37 warrior(s), 192, 201, 209, 210, 412, 430-

499-501, 503; and f o r m a , 207; frugality, 445-46; in Giannotti, 297-98; Gothic, 441, 513; and grace, 42, 48, 113 ; in Guicciardini, 134-35, 145, 230-31, 253, 256; in Harrington, 385-87, 390-91, 392-95* 4” . in Hume, 497; individual, 534; military, 203, 217, 296-97, 322; in Millar, 502 in Montesquieu, 490-93; natural, 540; and neo-Platonists, 99; and passion, 462, 467; patriot, 513; Periclean, 89; politicization of, 2 11; in Polybius, 78, 80; in 11 P r i n c i p e , 26, 181; as prudence, 24-25, 253; public, 397, 474; republican, 85, 88, 89; restoration of, 205-6; Roman, 205, 441, 513; in Savonarola, 108; science of, 115-16, 128, 243, 484; Spartan, 441; and stability, 194, 328, 426; Tuscan, 2i7n; a woman’s, 405 ( a n d s e e civic, Venetian mechanization of, and v i r t u ) v i r t u s , 37-39, 41, 42, 78, 86, 87-89, 157, 335* 350* 405* 465n, 472, 475* 479* 499* 529* 535 Visconti, Giangaleazzo, 55, 57, 150 v i t a a c t i v a , 40, 56, 58, 84, 86, 98, 333, 335* 35°, 485* 539* 54